A sliver of sparkling white beach was the last stronghold against the incoming tide for the last-of-the day beachgoers, their brightly colored beach toys, umbrellas, towels and bathing suites gleaming in the golden sun like party decorations on a birthday cake. Just a few hundred yards inland from famed Ogunquit Beach, Route One traffic through the center of town was inching along as throngs of people ducked in and out of cute shops selling exotic teas, unusual trinkets, fine-crafted chocolates, pastries, beach clothing, and more. It was a typical late-summer evening in one of Maine’s popular seaside towns.

We were among the throng that day but decided to get away from the beehive of activity by strolling the sidewalk just around the corner to the northern start of the beloved oceanside pathway known as Marginal Way. On cold winter days, a scan from Marginal Way can yield amazing views of little slate-blue and chestnut harlequin ducks bobbing in the white foam along the rocky edges, sometimes with other winter sea ducks from the north like black, white-winged, and surf scoters nearby.

But this hot late-August evening, these birds were months away from arriving on the Maine coast. The path wound between two beachfront hotels, kids batting a yellow ball inexpertly on the green tennis courts on one side, fashionably dressed couples draped over white lawn chairs holding glasses of white wine as they gazed out to sea on the other.

We made our way through and onto the narrow gravel path, sliding sideways to let baby strollers by in tight spots, evading the occasional thorny rose bush overhanging the trail, all the while deeply breathing in the cool salt air gently flowing from the endless ocean. We stopped and scanned the horizon from a bench near a small granite headland, pleased to discover a few dozen tern-sized Bonaparte’s gulls flitting along a tidal rift a few hundred yards offshore. Unlike most other gulls, Bonaparte’s nest in trees, usually spruce trees, across the Boreal Forest biome of Canada and Alaska. But they come to our Maine coast in numbers as the summer progresses, some staying into the early winter before usually moving farther south.

Later, as we started back along the path toward town, something caught our eye down on the jumble of rocks some 30y feet below us on the shore. A smooth, brown, orange-sized object moved. The binoculars, in their sharp focus, revealed to us that the brown orange-sized object was actually astride two yellow legs and had a head and white breast with a black collar. It was a semipalmated plover. Just then it gave its mellow “chuwee” call and jumped to another rock—and we realized that there were more! Before we were done, we counted 20 individuals roosting there on the rocks, yards away from walkers by the dozen.

Friends and colleagues had shared photos taken of semipalmated plovers only weeks ago from remote places like the Seal River Watershed of northern Manitoba and the shores of Hudson Bay in northern Ontario where the birds could have gone much of the summer without a single person in sight. These same birds now here in Ogunquit, foraging just yards from the sights and sounds of thousands of people, spent the summer nesting in places almost unimaginably wild and remote. From here those semipalmated plovers may travel as far south as southern South America, though some stay even as far north as the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts into the winter.

Very few of our fellow human travelers that day relished the special experience we enjoyed. They felt no connection to the global odyssey of earth’s grand bird migration spectacle. Birds that had perhaps seen polar bears only days or weeks ago now stood only feet from all of us on that path on the coast of Maine. Within a few more weeks these same birds could well be sitting among the tangled roots of a steamy hot mangrove forest on the coast of some Central or South American or Caribbean nation.

We are grateful that we could be witness to even a small piece of that mysterious and marvelous journey.

Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Vice President of Boreal Conservation for National Audubon. Dr. Wells is one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists. He is a coauthor of the seminal “Birds of Maine” book and author of the “Birder’s Conservation Handbook.” His grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, a nonprofit membership organization working statewide to protect the nature of Maine. Both are widely published natural history writers and are the authors of the popular books, “Maine’s Favorite Birds” (Tilbury House) and “Birds of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao: A Site and Field Guide,” (Cornell University Press).