Red Birds in Maine

Stand at the edge of a spruce stand in Baxter State Park in January and you may hear a chip note you cannot place - a dry, metallic tick coming from high in the canopy. Then a dozen birds drop into the outer branches and begin working the cones sideways, bills crossed at the tip like a tool made for exactly this job. That is the Red Crossbill, Loxia curvirostra, and it has not arrived on schedule. It does not keep a schedule. It goes where the cones are.

Maine is one of the few eastern states where the crossbill logic plays out in full. Most places have red birds that arrive in spring and leave in autumn. Maine has those too. But it also has a suite of species whose movements are driven not by temperature or day length but by cone crops and berry yields - species that may be absent for three winters and then descend in numbers the fourth. The thesis of this state’s red birds is supply and demand, not the calendar.

The residents

The Northern Cardinal, Cardinalis cardinalis, is the species most associated with winter red in eastern yards, but it is worth noting where it stands in Maine. Cardinals have expanded northward over the past century as suburban plantings and year-round feeders extended viable winter habitat. In southern Maine - Portland, the York County coast, the Kennebec Valley - they are now resident and reliable. In the north they remain sparse. A cardinal at a feeder in Millinocket in February is unusual enough to photograph.

The Purple Finch, Haemorhous purpureus, is a different story. This is the bird Maine ornithologists think of as the baseline red finch - not the House Finch, which is a western species that colonised the northeast and gets misidentified constantly. The male Purple Finch is dipped-in-raspberry where the House Finch is streaky-red on forehead and breast. Purple Finches breed across the Maine interior and winter in loose flocks, working berry-bearing shrubs and seed feeders from October through March.

The House Finch, Haemorhous mexicanus, is present year-round in southern Maine towns and cities. He earns his red differently. Like the Northern Cardinal, male House Finches derive their colour entirely from carotenoid pigments absorbed through diet - the same mechanism described in the cardinal molting cycle. A male raised on a diet poor in carotenoids will be yellow, not red. A well-fed bird in a good berry year will be as red as the name suggests.

The nomads

Red Crossbills and White-winged Crossbills, Loxia leucoptera, are both present in Maine’s spruce-fir forests, but “present” is misleading. They erupt. Ornithologists call these movements irruptions - large-scale shifts driven by cone crop failure in core boreal forest. When the cone crop fails across Quebec and Ontario, crossbills and grosbeaks push south. Maine catches the edge of these movements every few years.

The Red Crossbill is particularly strange in that it does not have a single breeding season. If cone crops hold, it will nest in any month, including January. Nesting has been documented in Maine in midwinter. The bird does not need spring. It needs spruce.

The Pine Grosbeak, Pinicola enucleator, is the largest finch likely to appear at a Maine feeder - roughly robin-sized, the male a soft rose-red that does not read as red at distance. It arrives in irruption years from November onward and works mountain-ash and crabapple trees methodically. It is slow and approachable. Baxter State Park and the area around Rangeley Lake are reliable in good irruption winters.

Maine’s red birds divide into two camps: the residents that track berry shrubs and feeders through the winter, and the nomads that track cone crops across hundreds of miles. The nomads are harder to predict and more interesting to find.

The summer arrivals

The Scarlet Tanager, Piranga olivacea, is the most improbable-looking bird in the Maine woods. The male in breeding plumage - full scarlet body, flat black wings - looks subtropical against the green of a Maine deciduous forest in May. He is not a boreal bird. He prefers mature oak and mixed hardwoods and is most consistent in the rolling country of southern and central Maine, thinning out north of Bangor. He arrives in late May and is gone by September.

The Ruby-throated Hummingbird, Archilochus colubris, arrives in late May along Maine’s coast and river valleys. The male’s gorget is iridescent red-orange, depending on the light. He is a pollinator with the metabolism of a sprint athlete and he leaves by late August, before the cold sets in.

The Rose-breasted Grosbeak, Pheucticus ludovicianus, is worth a mention for the male’s triangular red chest patch - a blaze that looks painted on against the white-and-black body. He sings in deciduous forest from late May onward and is often the first confirmation that spring migration is running.

Where to look

Location	Best red species
Baxter State Park	Red Crossbill, White-winged Crossbill, Pine Grosbeak
Monhegan Island	Scarlet Tanager, Rose-breasted Grosbeak (migration)
Acadia National Park	Purple Finch, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, warblers
Moosehorn NWR	Purple Finch, Scarlet Tanager, woodpeckers
Southern Maine suburbs	Northern Cardinal, House Finch, Purple Finch

Monhegan Island, 12 miles offshore, is worth its own note. In May and September it concentrates migrating songbirds that have crossed open water and need to land. A Scarlet Tanager on Monhegan in May is not finding forest - it is finding the first land. The island’s bird list for a single spring day can read like a continental survey.

How the species compare

Species	Red feature	Season	Key habitat
Northern Cardinal	All-red body (male)	Year-round (southern ME)	Suburban shrubs, feeders
Purple Finch	Raspberry wash (male)	Year-round	Mixed forest, feeders
House Finch	Red head and breast (male)	Year-round	Towns, suburbs
Scarlet Tanager	All-red body, black wings (male)	May - September	Deciduous forest
Red Crossbill	Brick-red body (male)	Irruptive	Spruce-fir forest
White-winged Crossbill	Rose-red body (male)	Irruptive	Boreal conifers
Pine Grosbeak	Rose-red head and breast (male)	Irruptive, winter	Mountain-ash, crabapple
Ruby-throated Hummingbird	Red gorget (male)	May - August	Gardens, forest edge
Rose-breasted Grosbeak	Red breast triangle (male)	May - September	Deciduous woodland

The crossbills are under-counted in most years because they stay in the canopy and move fast. The Cornell Lab’s eBird shows Maine crossbill records spiking sharply in irruption years and dropping close to zero between them. If you visit the spruce forests in an off year, you may hear nothing. If you visit in the right January, you may find 50 birds working a single stand.

For the residents - cardinal, Purple Finch, House Finch - the difference between a good year and a poor one at your feeder often comes down to what is growing in the yard. Species that can read a state’s red birds as a matter of luck are missing the more interesting variable: the food supply that brings certain birds back and the habitat structure that holds them through the cold months. Maine’s nomadic finches say it plainly. The cone crop runs, and the birds run with it.