Imagine you are driving from Florida to Maine this spring. All along the way you will have to find places to stop to get a drink and a bite to eat, find a place to sleep, and refresh. We, as travelers, are always on the lookout for stopover locations that are clean, safe, and have great options for food and drink. Perhaps you, like us, have had the occasional situation during long travels when bad weather, bad planning, or some other circumstance has forced us to spend the night in a questionable motel or to try to piece together a meal from the few items on the nearly bare shelves of a gas station store in some remote location. Hopefully, more often than not when we travel we have the opposite experience at our stopover locations: wonderful places to get a nutritious meal and a good night’s rest, safe from harm of any kind.

For migrating birds, it is no different. Consider an American redstart flying north after having spent the winter in a steamy mangrove forest on Cuba. The American redstart is a small warbler, the male cloaked in jet black with bright orange in the wings, tail, and breast; the female is more muted in grays and yellows. American redstarts have an extensive breeding range from the Gulf Coast north across much of the Boreal Forest region of Canada from Newfoundland in the East to southern Yukon in the West. Our Cuban wintering American redstart might depart from Cuba in March flying at night northward across the open ocean to reach Florida by dawn. Here it will descend in the predawn murky light and quickly try to discern a favorable place on the landscape for its stopover. With luck it will find itself above a large patch of forest, perhaps in a national park, national forest, or state park. With less luck it may find itself over a vast metropolitan area like Miami as the sun rises. Here it will have to hope for a small municipal park or maybe even just a patch of a few trees—perhaps the equivalent in our human example of the almost-empty gas station store, with few options for food and drink. If it is fortunate, the few trees it finds will be enough cover to keep it safe from marauding house cats and hungry hawks.

That little bird will be faced with the same risks, day after day, as it moves north toward its breeding grounds perhaps thousands of miles away. And this is just one individual bird of one species.

You can see from this example why good stopover locations are so critical to the survival of migratory birds.

Coastal Maine is often the first stopover location for many birds that have flown overnight over the open sea. They arrive exhausted and incredibly hungry and thirsty. Safe havens for them are crucial to their survival. Conservation lands provided by land trusts like the Boothbay Region Land Trust and others are among the most important stopover locations for the waves of these migratory birds moving through our area. And they provide open public access—anyone can go out and enjoy finding and watching these migratory jewels.

International Migratory Bird Day is May 13 and the theme is “Stopover Sites: Helping Birds Along the Way.” Get out this weekend and celebrate bird migration with the tens of millions of other bird enthusiasts across Maine and the U.S. And throughout the year, please support efforts to conserve land for birds!

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.”