We left it till the rendezvous to decide whether to visit the Lake Erie shore or inspect potentially fruitful reservoirs, as this is preeminently the season for waterbirds. Legend has it that waterfowl move with a full moon, and we had a good one, which eleven of us followed west to Springfield. Along the way ground fog grew thicker, until the moon was a dim disc of pinkish haze sinking in the west, without much corresponding light gathering in the east. I had predicted a good show from the town’s big crow roost, and we got looks a a modest few thousand in the mist as we drove over to Buck Creek SP. Mist there prevented us from finding much more than a gull flock on the beach, and Old Reid Park had plenty of geese and a few ducks as far as we could see—which wasn’t very far in the enveloping mist.
The latter impediment swaddled us all the way up to our next stop, Indian Lake, where we had to walk a hundred yards to make sure those dimly-discerned dark objects were only more Canada geese. In a day that had been forecast to be sunny with temps in the 50s, gloom followed us until we reached Lima, where a thousand or so ruddy ducks were accompanied by a few others, all duly studied. An occasional patch of blue appeared on our way to Buckeye Lake in Bluffton, where after a fruitless walk around the pond the black-bellied whistling-duck was finally discovered in the creek about a hundred yards from where we’d parked.
Spirits had lifted with the fog, and after a confirmatory phone call to Paulding County, we decided to chance a visit to this remote — and for at least one of the leaders unexplored — territory. We looked fruitlessly for a brant seen just earlier by others in a field, hampered I must admit by my incomplete recollection of its location. Undaunted, we drove through the town of Paulding and located an improbable cattle egret where it stood, of course carefully avoiding the pond, in a rural lawn,. A clarifying phone call led us south again for the brant. We stopped along the way at the Black Swamp Nature Center, where a flock of 50-60 trumpeting sandhill cranes circled above, as if to inspire us. The little Paulding Reservoir had a satisfying collection of waterfowl, our best of the day, and when we approached the brant location we saw the immature bird from two hundred yards off as we approached, improbably standing in inch-high sprouting wheat maybe 75 feet off the county road. We gawked for a while at this oddity as it continued to feed, with only occasional wary glances at us.
At a fueling stop — we did 400+ miles this day — a rump group took on a side trip for other rarities, and the rest of us headed home, relieved to have rescued a satisfying day from a murky beginning. Considering we were virtually blindfolded till late morning, and in view of the long hours spent on the freeway, we were happy with a list of 50 species, which follows, including some nice ones. How many people get to see a brant from the Arctic and a whistling-duck from Central America on the same Ohio afternoon, after all? The list follows:
Black-bellied whistling-duck
Brant
Canada goose
Tundra swan
Gadwall
American black duck
Mallard
Northern pintail
Lesser scaup
Bufflehead
Hooded merganser
Ruddy duck
Common loon
Horned grebe
Cattle egret
Northern harrier
Red-tailed hawk
American kestrel
Great blue heron
Turkey vulture
American coot
Sandhill crane
Killdeer
Bonaparte’s gull
Ring-billed gull
Herring gull
Rock pigeon
Mourning dove
Red-bellied woodpecker
Belted kingfisher
Downy woodpecker
Northern flicker
Blue jay
American crow
Horned lark
Black-capped chickadee
White-breasted nuthatch
Brown creeper
American robin
European starling
American pipit
Cedar waxwing
Song sparrow
White-throated sparrow
Dark-eyed junco
Northern cardinal
Red-winged blackbird
House finch
American goldfinch
House sparrow