You’ve got to love birds who fly transoceanic or transcontinental to vacation with us in Maine. You never know who’s going to blow into town.

Unlike hummingbirds, who routinely put in serious mileage (4,000 miles) from Mexico to join us every summer, the rare Steller’s sea eagle who flew all the way from Siberia to land on the Maine coast is a spectacular example of a “vagrant” or a “vagabond”—a bird roaming far from its usual migratory route.  

It’s kind of flattering, really.  

“Oh, yeah. Our hummingbirds go to Central America,” says Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “There’s a whole suite of them.” Toward the beginning of their return to Maine, “They’ll fly across the Gulf of Mexico, a 12–24 hour flight from the Yucatán. Last summer we were coming back from Monhegan. From the deck of our ferry we saw a single hummingbird coming across” in formation with the boat for the final few miles to the shore.  

“Oddities,” Wells says, can draw big crowds. “The redwing thrush that showed up in Capisic Pond Park in January 2021 drew hundreds—probably thousands—of birdwatchers to see it. It could be a bird that got off track from Europe and made its way [west, then] south. My own theory is that it came from Greenland.”  

Two varieties of pelicans, the brown and the American white, have signed Maine’s guest book as visitors. The earliest record of a brown pelican stopping by is 1826, followed by 1914, then 1922. (We won’t talk about the pet pelican that escaped from Castine to Bar Harbor in 1900 only to end up as a taxidermy exhibit in the Maine State Museum.) Then the visits stopped. Eight decades later, a brown flew into Harpswell in 2007.   

Does “our” Steller’s sea eagle experience loneliness so far from his native Siberia? Does he shriek for his mate, or is this just a projection we humans are putting on him during COVID?  

“They don’t typically travel in pairs during migration,” Wells says. “This sea eagle isn’t unusual for being alone [right now]. Hormones will come into play and he’ll think of a mate in the coming months. He could look at the surrounding bald eagle population” for some beautiful music. Does he pause, or am I imagining it? “A hybrid between a Steller’s and a bald eagle has been reported near Vancouver.” 

Fascinating. A walk on the wild side?