Tooling about along roads lined with snowbanks during this last holiday break, we found ourselves ending up, shortly after 1 p.m. on one sunny day, out at the Nubble.
There we found perhaps five cars and six people, among them one who looked, clearly, to us, like a certified Serious Birder. He'd angled his car so that he could sit on its tailgate with all of the ocean's expanses, to the north, east and south, in view, and he had a spotting scope set up on a tripod before him, with binoculars also at the ready in one hand, and a pencil and clipboard nearby for use by the other.
He turned out to be, indeed, no ordinary birder, but Eric Hynes, staff naturalist for Maine Audubon, and he was engaged that day, he told us when we approached, in the National Audubon Society's annual nationwide Christmas bird count.
Volunteers all across North America make that count, Eric explained before we could ask, with each picking one day within a set three-week period that spans Christmas, and observing, on that day, from dawn to dusk, all the birds within a circle 15 miles in diameter - "even," he said, "the pigeons."
National Audubon does the pre-count organizing and collects the data afterward, he added, but the fact that the volunteers are people from all walks of life, with widely varying degrees of knowledge about birds and birding, and novices being paired off with experts, makes this truly what he called, appreciatively, "citizen science."
Eric's own job that day was to, as he put it, "staff the sea watch," while three other people counting in his assigned sector worked out of sight inland.
Periodically stopping to scan the horizon with his binoculars, he explained that some birds live only on the ocean, and that most seabirds fly close to the ocean's surface. He was also listening, he said, to identify them, because such birds also often make distinctive call notes when flying.
Since he'd begun at that spot at 7 a.m. that day, he reported, he'd counted 29 species, and when we asked whether that was a low or high count he answered, "For sitting in one spot just looking at the ocean, I'm doing pretty well."
When we asked what the most unusual birds he'd sighted so far on that day had been, he named: three razorbills, which he described as "cousins to the puffin" that come to land only to nest (on Matinicus Rock, for example), spending the rest of the year on the ocean; common redpolls, described as "small finches of the boreal forests of Canada and Alaska that you don't see often here"; a red-throated loon; and a bald eagle - of which, Eric noted in passing, there are now over 400 nesting pairs now in Maine.
As we were speaking, Eric took a call on his cell phone that revealed that one of the other birders in his group had just made a very rare sighting: near the sewage treatment plant in Wells, a western tanager - a bird Eric described as "a vagrant from out West that breeds in the Rockies and winters in South America." He called it "a neo-tropical migrant whose compass must be a little off."
More commonly sighted that day, he said, were herring gulls, common eiders, great cormorants, and common loons. Also expected there in winter, Eric added, were red-necked grebes, horned grebes, and purple sandpipers.
The fact that Audubon has been conducting this annual count since about 1900, Eric said, means that it now has a tremendous data base from which to observe changes - shifts in birds' ranges, for example, and declines in bird populations.
We didn't discuss overall declines in bird populations, but Eric did cite the rusty blackbird and the northern bobwhite as birds whose populations have declined nationally, and he named four once exclusively-southern birds now appearing here that, a century ago, he said, "would never have been found in Maine:" the northern cardinal, the northern mockingbird, the tufted titmouse, and the Carolina wren.
As we were talking to Eric, a man with a professional-looking camera approached and asked Eric about a cormorant perched on a distant rocky prominence, its wings outstretched to dry.
The man proved to be Werner Horn, from West Franklin, N.H., there with a friend, Gloria Dunphe, also from West Franklin, and the bird proved to be a great cormorant from Canada, "cousin," Eric volunteered, "to the double-crested cormorant."
We then took some time to chat with Werner, who said, amicably, of his photography, "During the summer, I do bugs, and in winter I do gulls" - and when we admitted to being pretty intrigued, he went to his car and extracted a portfolio to show us.
With the first photo we saw there came a story.
It was of a gull, taken from its under side in full flight, its wings outstretched, and, all white against a brilliant blue sky, it looked like common representations of a peace dove.
Werner and his wife, he recounted, had just returned from a trip to Nova Scotia, where they'd been engaged in a project to help raise money for an Anglican priory, Saint Joseph's, in Springfield, by creating a marketable calendar using that photo.
The priory, of the order of St. Augustine, Werner explained, serves as place for priests to go for individually-tailored retreats, and to retire. Not a parish church, and located inland where there is little wealth, it nevertheless opens its doors for masses to neighboring residents who often can repay only in gifts of food.
"The fathers live off of that, to a great extent," Werner said.
Werner is not an Anglican himself, he reported, but his wife is, and they learned of the priory and its needs when a Harvard-trained priest from their area in New Hampshire, in Tilton, donated his library to it.
They have since found, Werner said, the priory residents to be "really nice people." "It's been a pleasure," he added, "to help them out."
Werner gave us the priory's address to pass along, in case others might want to join him in that effort. It's St. Joseph's Priory, 449 Ridge Rd, Springfield, Nova Scotia.
We learned some other intriguing facts about Werner's life, some of which are directly related to local lives hereabouts.
Werner, he reported, had worked as a stay-at-home dad, bringing up the couple's two sons, both of whom are now grown, while his wife worked, and still works, as a hydrologist for the U.S. Geological Survey, specializing in water use.
Her most recent project: a study of water problems, including salt infiltration, in Seacoast New Hampshire.
Werner showed us some of his very impressive color close-ups of insects and small animals - spiders, flies, a snake, a monarch butterfly - before we parted - and then he left us laughing.
He's now focusing just on those creatures' faces, he said, adding, "I've come across some grasshoppers with some very nice smiles."
