The Data

Data for this website was derived from personal records of multiple observers, unpublished birds of MDI manuscripts by Will Russell (1977) and Chris Witt (1994), a review of the popular birding literature including Audubon Field Notes and its successors from 1950 to 2010; Maine Bird Notes in their entirety; all of Bill Townsend's Guillemot; the archive of the Maine Bird Records Committee; the Birds of Maine (Peter Vickery et al, 2020), Acadia National Park archives including the Cadillac Mountain Hawkwatch, the Schoodic Seabird Survey and the records of former Park Naturalist, Paul Favour; College of the Atlantic archives including the Mount Desert Rock Whale watch reports; Zack Klyver’s logs from his Bar Harbor whale watch Cruises 2013-2017; all banding records for the region with those of Barbara Patterson in Somesville being by far the most extensive; relevant reports from the Maine Coastal islands National Wildlife Refuge, and in the last decade, careful consideration of the data generated by eBird, a bird reporting system developed by the Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell University and now used by hundreds of thousands of observers worldwide. Information in the Miscellany section came from Birds of the World, a bird life history service (subscription required) of Cornell University’s Laboratory of Ornithology, and from the personal experiences and readings of this website’s creator, Will Russell