HILTON, New York (AP) – Greg Lawrence crashed through the underbrush, eyes wide, binoculars swinging from his neck.

“Worm-eating Warbler! Worm-eating Warbler! That’s a lifer for me,” he called to the group of birders he was leading on a woodland trek near Lake Ontario. “Wow. Whew. That made my day. I just got my bins on it before it flew away.”

Lawrence, something of a birding prodigy at age 15 with 305 species already on his life list, explained that the Worm-eating Warbler is a rare sight so far north. The drab, greenish bird, hard to spot as it forages for caterpillars in dense underbrush, nests in the Appalachians and points south.

“It occasionally overshoots its breeding grounds and rests here,” he said.

The wayward warbler is just one of myriad species of songbirds, shorebirds, raptors and waterfowl found along the shores of Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence River and Lake Erie, a region known as the Seaway Trail.

While avid birders have long flocked to the region, particularly during the spring and fall migration when incredible numbers of birds can be spotted, many people are unaware of the avian bounty here.

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written by Andrew