As Jeannette and I boarded our plane at the Portland Jetport on Thursday the 14^th, I had a sinking feeling of future regret. While I was very much looking forward to attending my cousin’s wedding, seeing family, and spending some time in Philadelphia, I could not help but wonder if I was about to miss the birding event of a lifetime in Maine.

While concern about lives, property, and environmental damage of course reign supreme, birders can repress that as the “rarity fever” symptoms surge and dreams of vagrants and storm-tossed seabirds dance in our minds. As with any storm, safety comes first, but as soon as it’s reasonably safe to venture outside, birders hit the ground. Birders along the Gulf Coast and Florida are used to gearing up for this. We here in New England are not.

Hurricanes are rare this far north – at least for now – and few have been as big as Hurricane Lee. Lee was barreling straight for Downeast Maine as of Thursday morning, with a possible direct hit on Washington County or the Bay of Fundy.  Had I not had family obligations (family first! Although, yes, I did wonder for a second if I should claim COVID and run out of the airport) I would have been heading to Lubec this weekend without a doubt. I’ve never done a bonafide storm (bird) chase, and this would be the chance.

While an upper-level trough could still push Lee well to our east, it seemed clear we would be seeing some impacts here in Maine regardless.  Be that a strong northeasterly wind producing exceptional -but perhaps rarity-free seawatching – or first state records from a direct hit (White-faced Storm-Petrel anyone?), I would have liked to be in position to find out.

Instead, I’ll watch from afar as events unfold, and hope either 1) I have less regrets, or 2) a vagrant or two stick around until Tuesday! 

Several friends and I had been discussing the possible rarity potential of Hurricane Lee, and Luke Seitz immediately pointed out the similarity to the track of Hurricane Fiona that slammed into eastern Nova Scotia in September of 2023.

Making landfall in the early morning hours of September 23^rd between Canso and Guysborough, Fiona caused unprecedented damage throughout a large portion of Atlantic Canada. It also yielded some unprecedented birding.

The summary of the storm’s windfall (pardon the pun) is summarized by this American Birding Association blog post.

But there are two particularly epic eBird checklists, here and here, that captured the moment.

Was this about to happen in Maine? Would I be missing it? Arrgh!

While birding at the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge on the outskirts of Philly on Friday morning helped take my mind off of it, my thoughts were often wandering to my friends Downeast. First and foremost was their safety and well-being. A distant second, however, was the birding. By Saturday morning, when we took a walk around Independence National Historic Park, I waited for my phone to blow up.

And then…crickets.

Before making landfall, Hurricane Lee had transitioned to a post-tropical cyclone over the Gulf of Maine. It also had shifted slightly east – making a direct hit on Nova Scotia now seem more likely. The storm was now absolutely massive in size, with tropical storm-force winds from New Hampshire to Cape Breton. A little wobble in the stormtrack in the late morning shifted the center of the storm into the Bay of Fundy, skimming Nova Scotia’s southwest coast.

But I heard nothing from back home, so I just couldn’t take it anymore and began checking in via text messages. Chris Barlett was stationed on the seawall at Eastport, where he spent “5 hours watching the ocean…during the worst weather on Saturday in hopes of seeing just one rare bird.  Torrential rain and 60mph gusts rocked my vehicle.  Dozens of Bonaparte’s gulls and up to 20 common terns flew against the wind and fed in the waves beside my truck, but no rarities joined the fray.  We lost power at home for about 12 hours. “

Luke and cohorts were heading east into New Brunswick. Evan Obercian was out checking for grounded shorebirds in the Mid-Coast. Nova Scotia birders were repositioning. I decided to drown my expected sorrows in cheese whiz.

With a strong northeasterly wind, seawatching along Maine’s southern coast was about average for the conditions. No rarities; just a few more pelagic species closer to shore than normal – although all within the expected birds for a good onshore blow. And while there were a few more shorebird reports inland than average, nothing was suggestive of a major grounding.

By Saturday afternoon, with the storm making its landfall Nova Scotia (officially on Long Island), a few reports started to make it in – but nothing of even a remotely tropical nature in Maine. In southern Maine and the mid-coast, winds were already whipping out of the northwest, ushering any seabirds further from shore. Seawatching was a bust. In other words, it was a non-event.

In New Brunswick, Luke reported “a few storm birds on the Saint John River in the afternoon and on Sunday Morning” but just the regular Bay of Fundy species and not in any unusual numbers, and rare bird reports from the province were non-existent.

It remained a non-event in Maine through Sunday morning. Here’s Chris’s report from Eastport: “I went back to the breakwater on Sunday morning and watched the sunrise as I scanned the waters between Campobello Island , NB and Eastport, Maine.  There weren’t many birds flying and low tide was around 7am (no rips), so I decided to launch my little skiff.  At 9am Doug Hitchcox and I took a cruise through choppy seas in Head Harbor Passage.  We found a few hundred Bonaparte’s gulls and a handful of common terns feeding in the tidal rips but, alas, no rarities.  I kept an eye out throughout the day for vagrant seabirds while I was cleaning up the yard and mowing the lawn.  Oh well, at least there wasn’t widespread damage!”  Seawatching elsewhere was similarly uneventful.

There weren’t even a lot of reports of concentrations of common birds during the storm. An exception was the group of 50+ Snowy Egrets seeking shelter in a small pond in Freeport.

In Nova Scotia, however, birders were finding a few things thanks to the more eastern arrival of the storm, including a couple of tropical Bridled and Sooty Terns (the expected and hoped-for low-hanging fruit of tropical waifs). A Least Tern and a Gull-billed Tern were intriguing, as Lee never skimmed a coastline where these birds would be expected to be picked up from. Leach’s Storm-Petrels were being reported from a number of locations, especially in the afternoon.

By Sunday morning, Nova Scotia birders were out in force, with seawatching being productive. “Tons” of seabirds were passing the Cape St. Mary’s lighthouse on the southwest coast of Nova Scotia according to one report, as birds were pushed up against the shoreline on that side (as opposed to Maine) by the strong westerly wind. A few Leach’s Storm-Petrels were being found, included one found grounded on a lawn in Bedford and one passing the Cape D’or lighthouse near the head of the Bay of Fundy.  While I did not do an exhaustive search, displaced tropical or even true pelagic birds remained very few and very far between.

Even as of Monday, Leach’s Storm-Petrels were still being reported from the shore in Nova Scotia. A Gull-billed Tern continued in Grand Pre.  So birds were definitely displaced by the storm, but they were mostly non-tropical in nature…and nothing like Fiona.

There were however, a lot of uncommon to rare passerines being reported in Nova Scotia since Sunday morning (such as a White-eyed Vireo and a Golden-winged Warbler), but without a careful analysis of radar images and broader-scale wind maps, I am unconvinced these birds were somehow entrained or displaced in the storm all the way from the open ocean south of Bermuda. Possible, for sure, but could it also have been nothing more than “detection bias” with some many birders out looking because of the hope for storm-blown vagrants? I’ll leave this debate for another time Furthermore, a little spate of “good” southern warblers on Monhegan could also be related, or it could just be Monhegan being Monhegan as usual. 9/28 edit: As reports of North American passerines (aka “Yanks”) continue to pour in from Great Britian, it seems clear that Lee displaced countless numbers of Neotropical migrant songbirds. Enough that it even made the NY Times! I retract my earlier skepticsm (I wasn’t alone at least!) in being wary of this, but presumably birds were displaced ahead of and around the massive storm after encountering it as they headed south while over the open Atlantic.

But back to seabirds…Sure, some hotspots were closed or inaccessible in southern Nova Scotia during the peak of the storm, and conditions often made viewing impossible as the storm came ashore, but there were just so few sightings of note anywhere, despite the massive size of the storm.  I heard little from Grand Manan, however, and observations during the storm from there would be most interesting.

While the storm was too far east to be of major consequence to Maine and New Brunswick, the lack of tropical birds in comparison to Fiona was remarkable.  While every storm is different, and we’re far from understanding exactly what makes for a great birding storm, a very detailed comparison of these two systems would be a worthy endeavor. 

Granted, it’s not over yet: a Brown Booby at Quaco Head in New Brunswick on the morning of the 18^th could have been lingering from storm displacement, so maybe there are a few birds yet to be found. Also, the winds following the passage of the storm are perfect for producing Northern Wheatears in the following days and weeks after the storm (one was seen at Peggy’s Cove in Nova Scotia on the 17^th), so you know I’ll be back looking…now that I am back in the state!

But in the meantime, I wanted to learn more about what happened with Lee. I reached out to my friend Meteorologist Mallory Brooke, in part to understand what happens when the tropical system undergoes its transformation to an extra-tropical, cold-core system, as happened with both Fiona and Lee: “When that (transition) happens, the core of intense wind spreads out rapidly; hence why a landfall in Nova Scotia was creating high wind in New Hampshire. In addition, the precipitation shield usually expands as well, but we didn’t see so much of that with Lee.” Lee had basically become a massive Nor’Easter.

I wondered if this transition was when we lost the entrained birds. Mallory suggested“…perhaps the timing to landfall made the difference – the transition took place very close to landfall for Lee whereas Fiona still had some distance to travel”   Was this the reason for the lack of tropical rarities?  Did they escape, or perhaps even perish as the eye collapsed and/or the core transition occurred? Would a close analysis, far beyond the scope of this blog, comparing the timing and location of the transition and the eye wall collapse between Lee and Fiona explain something? Was it time (or lack there of) spent in the Gulf Stream waters where the likes of White-faced Storm-Petrels reside?

While birds – especially strong-flying seabirds – are pushed ahead of a storm, especially by the strong winds in the northeast quadrant, we now know that birds riding the calm of the eye has a lot to do – if not more – with transporting birds far distances in tropical systems. The phenomenon, as well as some of the variables that could be at play in this case, are well-explained in this article.

In the case of Lee, the eyewall collapsed over the Gulf of Maine before landfall (at which point the eye structure had briefly returned)…perhaps if birders were in the middle of it (no thanks!) at the time we would know.

Regardless, it is interesting to speculate on what could have been. And I am sure others, especially in Nova Scotia will analyze the storm and its sightings in more detail. But it’s still worthwhile the exercise, if only to prepare for where to be when the next storm approaches. With more tropical storms expected in the Gulf of Maine due to climate change, we will have to be prepared to be in place for the next one (and I am out of cousins who are yet to be married).

So in the end, I wasn’t lamenting what I had missed. The “fear of missing out” was not realized. While I would have enjoyed the chase and collecting more “negative data,” I had no lingering regrets…except, perhaps, from all of the cheese whiz.

Thanks to Chris Bartlett, Mallory Brooke, and Luke Seitz for their assistance and insight while writing this essay.