![\"colin08\"](\"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/colin08.jpg\")
<\/a>Do you like to travel by night? Maine\u2019s dismal, curvy roads can be daunting.<\/p>\nThat\u2019s why what songbirds do is so incredible. They\u2019re driven to fly north along the blackest of turnpikes at dizzy heights\u2013whether they like it or not.<\/p>\n
Particularly in May, yellow warblers and scarlet tanagers flicker above us unseen toward the Northern Boreal Forest in Canada during migration. Also \u201cblack-throated green warblers, indigo buntings, rose-breasted grosbeaks, orange-crowned warblers, American redstarts\u2026an estimated three billion birds\u2026\u201d says Dr. Jeff Wells of the Boreal Songbird Initiative. Hitting the night highway from winter getaways in South America, Central America, and Mexico, \u201cMillions of them pass over the nighttime landscape of Maine,\u201d bumping into each other, plunging on. Why do they do it? Why do we go to L.L. Bean? The magnetite in the back of our heads tells us this is the cool place to be.<\/p>\n
How do we know the birds are flying over us? \u201cSome preliminary observational papers published by the late 1800s\u201d took note of the phenomenon, Wells says. While few could see the birds, we could hear them: \u201cSome ornithologists and birders were aware that some thrushes could be identified by their calls as they flew overhead at night in the early and mid 1900s, and a few ornithologists began using acoustic techniques, radar, and ceilometers to study nocturnal migration beginning in the 1950s and 1960s. There has been a surge in research to identify the nocturnal flight calls of birds in the last 10 to 20 years.\u201d Also northbound over Portland in nightly swarms: purple finches and ruby-crowned kinglets. True tourists, many touch down en route and vacation with us here in Maine. Maybe a Baltimore oriole (winters in Mexico) swoops down and lands in a tree at Laudholm Farm. Yeah, this place feels right. We\u2019ll stay here for a while. <\/em>No wonder songbirds named red-eyed vireos cool their heels here after so much night driving.<\/p>\n See, we return\u2013following instinct, directed by desire. We\u2019re ships in the night seeking our ports. Don\u2019t try to make sense of it as we fight for parking spaces on Exchange Street at night. We\u2019re here because we need to be here. We can\u2019t help ourselves.<\/p>\n May 2015 Do you like to travel by night? Maine\u2019s dismal, curvy roads can be daunting. That\u2019s why what songbirds do is so incredible. They\u2019re driven to fly north along the blackest of turnpikes at dizzy heights\u2013whether they like it or not. Particularly in May, yellow warblers and scarlet tanagers flicker above us unseen toward […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":247,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[92],"class_list":["post-10560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editor","tag-may-2015"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10560"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14439,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10560\/revisions\/14439"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"