Potter's Web Links

This is where I intend to place and replace relevant links that I find to be of personal interest, to be extremely informative to students in classes here at Unity, and to meet requests of members of the local community.

Fisheries: in progress

Maine Insects:

The only contacts here now are to the recently developed Maine Damselfly and Dragonfly Survey sponsored primarily by the non-game section of Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. Results of my collecting in 1999 are not yet available. Those records will be posted here as well as within the larger report at MDDS at http://mdds.umf.maine.edu/~odonata/

Birding:

My interests in birding include local activities as well as data submission to a variety of citizen science projects sponsored by Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology (CLO) and National Audubon Society (NAS).

Most recently CLO sponsored the third Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC). That information appears at http://birdsource.org/gbbc/. I encourage birders to visit the site to view recent trends in winter bird distribution for Waldo County, Maine, and North America. Also schedule your calendar for the fourth GBBC late in February 2001.

I quite enjoy participating in several of the other CLO projects which accept local data into much larger databases.

Project Pigeon Watch ask for citizen scientist contributions about flock composition and behavioral interactions between birds of different color morphs.
House Finch Disease Survey is a continuing analysis of the spread of a Mycoplasma infection expressed in the eyes of house finches. The disease may be isolated to the introduced eastern population of house finches, for it is not reported in the far western states.
Project Feeder Watch and Classroom Feeder Watch are the most successful projects at Cornell. New on-line data entry opportunities every other week from November to April track winter bird populations across the continent. Classroom Feeder Watch is readily incorporated into the learning results curriculum at any K-8 classroom or school.
One of my favorites in recent weeks has been the Irruptive Bird Survey for reporting those species that occur infrequently in winter. However when the species do arrive locally, they are in tremendous numbers. This is a spectacular winter for bohemian waxwings, common redpolls, and evening grosbeaks. Some birders have seen northern shrike since November, but a lot of shrike might be only 2 birds.
I hope that Warbler Watch is renewed for the spring and summer of 2000.

These and other birding opportunities are all available through a CLO site map at http://birds.cornell.edu/sitemap.htm. Another address is http://birdsource.cornell.edu/

A new site at CLO will be the BirdCast for information about movements of bird flocks.

Other local birding activities in Maine are reported by:

The Maine Birding Home Page at http://www.mix-net.net/~paulg with a variety of other links.

The Stanton Bird Club in the Lewiston-Auburn area at http://www.avcnet.org/stanton.

Mid Coast Audubon Society at Rockland for good coastal birding records http://www.midcoastaudubon.org/.

The Unity Area Birders, a relatively new group in Waldo County, that sponsors birding activities in the local community and at Unity College. They are accessed at http://www.unity.edu/ServiceLearning/UAB/unity_area_birders.htm. UAB expects to post in the near future a Best Birds page for recent sightings, good birds, and birding hotspots in Waldo County.

The Weekly Bird Alert from Maine Audubon Society provides weekly news of bird sightings across the state at http://maineaudubon.org/bwee.htm

Finally, two other sites are the National Audubon Society at http://www.audubon.org/ and the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (SMBC) at The Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. at http://web2.si.edu/smbc/start.html.

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