On a recent morning we saw palm warblers, northern parula warblers, black-and-white warblers, northern waterthrushes, red-eyed vireos, brown thrashers, and chimney swifts. No, we weren’t enjoying early arrivals in Maine but in Florida. As our birds are starting to arrive back in Maine, we took the opportunity over April vacation to head south to enjoy some special family time and to meet migrants headed north. The swallow-tailed kites circled over our heads above Spanish moss-draped forests. White-eyed vireos sang their “chick-a-peea-chick” in the hot afternoons from the dense thickets. Stubby-tailed black vultures and the occasional wood stork soared overhead. Anhinga’s, those snaky-necked southern relatives of the cormorant, sunned themselves along the rivers above tall, brown-speckled limpkins that searched for snails on the lush green riverbanks, alligators watching sleepily from the shallows.

The night before, we had stepped outside to listen to an exuberant night-singing mockingbird around midnight and heard the calls of nocturnally migrating warblers flying overhead — about two calls per minute floated down from the dark and starry sky.

Migration is in full swing, and as we birded in the Sunshine State, it was exciting to wonder what newly arrived bird we may see next. Would it be a black-throated blue warbler that spent the winter in the Dominican Republic and is perhaps headed to its breeding territory in Edgecomb’s Schmid Preserve? Or a black-throated green warbler, perhaps one that wintered in Cuba and has its mind set on making its way to the Boothbay Region Land Trust’s Ovens Mouth Preserve to raise its young? Maybe an American redstart that wintered in Puerto Rico and will be back on territory in the Wiscasset Town Forest in a few weeks, flashing its orange and black tail to attract a mate.

Already, a few palm warblers had been seen in Maine, and yet there were still plenty of them flitting around in live oaks and pine woods and palm trees while we were in Florida. They spend the cold months in the southeastern U.S. and the Greater Antilles of the Caribbean even though they spend summers in a breeding range that extends from New England and the Adirondacks northward through much of Canada. Yellow-rumped warblers also winter in the southeastern U.S. and can be abundant in Florida in mid-winter but they seemed to be even less in evidence than palm warblers. The same is true of the tiny ruby-crowned kinglets. It seemed that most of the wintering yellow-rumped warblers and ruby-crowned kinglets had already departed from where we were in Florida, and both species were spotted in Maine over the last week or so.

In Florida, we were less likely to find a blackburnian warbler or bay-breasted. Neither species winters in the Caribbean but rather in northern South America (blackburnian) or southern Central America (bay-breasted). They migrate north through Mexico and travel either overland into the U.S. or across the Gulf of Mexico from the Yucatan Peninsula to the Gulf Coast states. Both species breed in Maine but only blackburnian warbler is a common nester in the Boothbay region, where the bright orange-throated males sing from the tippy top of tall spruces, firs, and hemlocks.

They’re headed to Maine so be sure to get out and see the spectacle of bird migration, including what has arrived today!

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 “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 authors of the book, “Maine’s Favorite Birds.”