At midnight tonight (Thursday, May 13), I will be sitting in the dark, ears tuned to the skies with my friend Louis Bevier, professional bird tour leader and ornithologist extraordinaire, in the dark spruce woods at the tip of a peninsula on the coast of Maine. We will be embarking on a version of a Big Day/Big Sit in which we will be trying to see how many bird species we can identify by sight and sound from a property on Ocean Point that the Boothbay Region Land Trust (on whose board I serve) is trying to protect. Many people have a romantic image of Maine as being a place of great natural beauty that abounds with wildlife. Maine is blessed on both counts but these attributes have also attracted many people to live and visit the state and the largest numbers of them end up on the coast. That has meant that parts of the Maine coast are considered the most impacted and at-risk places in the U.S. from loss of forest habitat to new homes and businesses. In fact, from 1980-2000 over 800,000 acres of Maine land, including 36,000 acres in Lincoln County, were converted from rural farms and forests to new homes and businesses. Land trusts are on the front lines of this trend, working for their communities to try to protect and maintain a backbone of natural areas that will sustain healthy ecological and human communities for generations. That’s some background as to why Louis and I will be doing our Big Day/Big Sit at this one location at one of the last pieces of significant natural habitat left in Ocean Point. Like many coastal Maine habitats at the end of peninsulas, the cooler climate that results from the proximity to the open ocean favors a forest type that is more typical of further north. It is dominated by spruce trees like those that typify the Boreal Forest. The property also has a pond and marsh and the open ocean is only a hundred yards away—though not very visible which will make it hard for us to pad our list with ocean birds. We expect and hope that many migrants will be passing through the property throughout the day and that at night we will hear fly-over migrants as well as some owls and marsh birds. We will be attempting to send updates and maybe some photos and video throughout the night and day to www.borealbirds.org and possibly some other sites as well.