No, our column this week is not about long-forgotten movie stars or child singers from decades back. It concerns the whereabouts of Maine’s spring migratory birds.

As usual, our March days have been flip-flopping from cold, blustery, snowy and generally, wintry one day and mild and spring-like the next. While some of us (that would be Jeff!) struggle with the decision as to when to retire the long johns for the season, we have been daydreaming about when some of our spring birds will return and where they are now in their migratory journey. To answer the question of where they are now, we turned to eBird.

We have discussed eBird many times in these columns but to give you a quick refresher, eBird is a project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society that provides an Internet site (www.ebird.org) where anyone and everyone can contribute any bird sighting from anywhere in the world. All of the information—more than 6 million bird checklists have so far been submitted—is archived in a database that anyone can search at any time. Scientists are using this rich treasure trove of data to study all sorts of interesting questions, but you don’t have to be an academic to explore eBird and answer your own questions.

We started with the question, “Where are the blackburnian warblers now?” Blackburnian warblers are a  common breeding warbler species of the Maine coast, the brilliant orange-throated males singing their super high-pitched songs from the tops of spruce and hemlock trees at places like the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, Boothbay Region Land Trust’s Ocean Point and Porter Preserves, and the Wiscasset Town Forest. Blackburnian warblers spend their winters in the mid-elevation forests of the northern Andes of South America, and they don’t usually make it back here to Maine until sometime in May. When we zoomed into the eBird maps for blackburnian warbler, we found that the northern vanguard of migrants are now in southern Mexico, with a couple of reports from southern Florida.

An even more abundant breeding warbler in our area and one that also prefers tall spruces and hemlocks is the black-throated green warbler. With their bright yellow cheeks and black throats, the males belt out a zippy “zee-zee-zee-zoo-zee” song that can be heard up and down the Maine coast. Black-throated green warblers don’t move as far south to winter as do blackburnian warblers, mostly wintering in Mexico and the Caribbean. A look at the eBird maps told us that the leading edge of black-throated green warblers stretched across Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, with one record of two birds in coastal South Carolina.

Ruby-crowned kinglets, despite being one of the tiniest birds around, are hardier winterers, most of them spending the winters as far north as the southern U.S. This year a particularly tough individual actually spent the entire winter coming to a feeder in Waldoboro! But when we checked eBird, we could see that there are now lots of ruby-crowned kinglets that have pushed north as far as Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. We will likely start seeing some of them on the next day or two of warmer south winds.

Bobolinks are one of our favorite birds. The boldly patterned black, white, and cream-colored males fly up from pastures and hayfields with their loud exuberant song starting mid- to late-May. But their wintering range is one of the most southerly of any of our songbirds—primarily in the grasslands of Argentina. Maps from eBird don’t yet show any bobolinks north of Argentina, although there are many fewer observers in South America so perhaps some have already started north. Either way, it is an amazing journey. Come on up bobolinks, and other spring migrants, we are waiting for you!

Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Dr. Wells is one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists and author of the Birder’s Conservation Handbook. His grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, a nonprofit membership organization working statewide to protect the nature of Maine. Both are widely published natural history writers and are the authors of the book, Maine’s Favorite Birds.