Wood frog. Ariana van den Akker

Spring means the beginning of the breeding season for a variety of animals in Maine, and that means many are changing their behavior and often making a lot of noise. From singing birds to trilling frogs and calling coyotes, I receive audio files – and sometimes hilarious descriptions – of noises nearly every day in the spring asking me to identify the source.

I’d like to use this space to highlight a few common misidentifications that people make, but also acknowledge that describing noises can be challenging. I encourage you to look up these noises so you can hear them for yourself. The Macaulay Library (macaulaylibrary.org) has a large archive of recordings, and is much more reliable than YouTube or other sites where people can label noises any way they want.

First up, as mentioned in my last column, on the first warm rainy nights in the spring, hundreds of frogs (and salamanders) make their way to vernal pools to breed. Along with birds singing, these calls are some of the first nature-noises we hear each year. Many Mainers are familiar with the “peeping” spring peepers, but I get frequent questions about wood frog noises. Wood frogs often emerge a little earlier than peepers, and their lower-frequency calls are less frog-like, especially if you’re used to hearing a peeper or bullfrog. Wood frogs make short, quick noises that are often described as “duck-like” but sound more like a little hiccup to me. Go learn this noise, teach it to a friend, and we can cut the number of emails I get in late March in half.

American woodcocks are singing their nasal “peent” from clearings on the edge of deciduous woods right now, attempting to woo a mate. This sound frequently gets misidentified as a common nighthawk calling. A nighthawk’s vocalization does sound very similar, but is perhaps a little coarser, and is more likely to remind you of a raspy version of Beaker from the Muppets. It helps to keep in mind that while woodcocks are early migrants, often returning to Maine in the last week of February, nighthawks are migrating all the way back from South America and won’t arrive until mid-May. Once we get to May, when you can hear both, it helps to focus on where the noise is coming from: if it’s on the ground at a consistent distance it’s a woodcock, but if it’s high in the sky and fading as it passes, it’s going to be a nighthawk.

A close relative to the woodcock is the Wilson’s snipe, and despite what you might hear about going on a “snipe hunt”, they are in fact very real. Snipe create a mechanical noise, called “winnowing,” as air passes through their specially-shaped outer tail feathers when they fly. This quivering “wu-wu-wu-wu” is often mistaken for two species of owls, eastern screech owls and boreal owls, both of which are quite rare in Maine. Outside of York County, screech owls remain very rare, and boreal owls are seen less than annually, and typically late fall or winter (and are never vocal). If you think you’re hearing one of these latter two, take out your phone and record the audio using a built-in app or even just by taking a video. Always start by eliminating the expected species before jumping to a rare option. Remember, when you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras.

The last noise I’ll mention is easily the most misidentified noise in Maine, and it’s not from a fisher (or colloquially “fisher cat” though they aren’t cats…). One hundred percent of the recordings that I’m sent by people thinking it’s a fisher are not fishers; they are almost always foxes (or other mammals). Foxes give a loud bark, and what is often called the “vixen’s scream” from females eliciting a mate (which could easily be used in a horror movie). Fishers are in the weasel family, of which no members are very vocal at all. Weasels are fairly fierce by nature, so I think many people assume that the fisher must be making the “horrible screams” they are hearing, but this is not the case. There are very few known vocalizations from fishers, and you’d be most likely to confuse them for a croaking frog or clucking chicken!

SANDHILL CRANES

Sandhill cranes. Pam Wells/Maine Audubon

Spring migration is ramping up for a lot of our early migrants. Red-winged blackbirds and common grackles have become common again with loud vocalizations filling the air most mornings. Waterfowl diversity and abundance are peaking, and even our earliest shorebirds are passing through on their way to more northerly breeding sites. Another species that is returning, that many Mainers might not even be aware of (if the number of inquiries I get each year is any indication), is the largest species to nest here, the sandhill crane.

Before getting into the history of sandhill cranes, it is worth clarifying exactly what they are. Having worked out of the Scarborough Marsh Audubon Center for six summers, I became very aware of how many Mainers use “crane” to refer colloquially to different species of herons or egrets. Despite both being long-legged and long-necked, they are quite different, with cranes more closely related to marsh-dwelling birds like rails (being in the same order: Gruiformes) than our white egret species like snowy or great egrets (egrets and herons being in the order Pelecaniformes).

This taxonomic (and genetic) separation is why, despite their physical similarities, you’ll often find them in different parts of your bird books. Egrets are most likely to be found in coastal, brackish (salt-mixed) marshes, while the cranes typically are found inland, nesting in freshwater marshy edges of lakes and in bogs, but more frequently encountered when they’re out foraging in meadows or agricultural fields. Also, our egrets are white, with herons taking on shades of blue and gray, while sandhill cranes are gray with varying rust-colored bodies, and a diagnostic telltale red patch of skin extending from their bill to above their eyes.

Sandhill cranes used to be much rarer in Maine, becoming an annual sighting in the late 1960s as migrants passed from their nesting grounds in Canada to the southern states they would winter in. Summer records slowly increased, but it wasn’t until 2000 that the first nesting record for Maine (and all of New England) was discovered from Messalonskee Lake in Belgrade. This satellite population has grown and spread, with small families of cranes popping up in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont over the decade after that first Maine nest. In the last four years of tracking for the Maine Bird Atlas, sandhill cranes have been found breeding in about a dozen sites, mostly around lakes close to the I-95 corridor from Gray to Pittsfield.

Keep your eyes peeled for these large cranes as they are migrating back to Maine. In flight they may remind you of herons, though they hold their necks out straight, never curling in as herons typically do on longer flights. Keep your ears open, too. The loud calls they’ll give in flight, often describe as a “bugling” or “trumpeting,” is an almost prehistoric visceral noise, and will give away their presence long before you see them. Or take a trip to Messalonskee Lake this spring and a dawn vigil will likely be rewarded with a sighting of these unique birds.

Do you have a nature question for Doug? Email questions to ask@maineaudubon.org and visit maineaudubon.org to learn more about backyard birding, native plants, and programs and events focusing on Maine wildlife and habitat. Doug leads free bird walks on Thursday mornings, 7 to 9 a.m., at the Gilsland Farm Audubon Sanctuary in Falmouth.