Finally, winter approached, and reports of northern-breeding birds like waterfowl and shrikes and longspurs reached Ohio. Boston still hadn’t recorded a frost, however, in a decidedly weird autumn season. Even though a dozen of our gang had gone or was on the way to New Jersey to see an arctic visitor, an ivory gull (in 60+ degree temperatures!), we managed to muster seven as we gathered on a frosty morning at Wothington Mall. We were to have a nice sunny morning at the Lake, but a cloudy afternoon, which I can prove with the sunburn on the left side of my neck. Winds were projected at 6-10 knots, but ended up much stronger, with consequent wind chills; as always, some participants (including yours truly, ignoring thirty years of experience) did not dress for the weather, but of course suffered bravely the day long.
We started at the Huron harbor, near the Lake’s westernmost deeper waters, at dawn. A couple thousand gulls were loafing on the lee side of the impoundment, and we unleashed our optics on them. The ones we could see were of the expected four species, but one that might well have been a California gull was found, and cursorily examined before shots rang out on the breakwall, and all the gulls burst into flight and scattered. All the ‘good’ gulls moved well away from shore, so we walked out the pier until we met friends returning from the lighthouse, who saved us time by reporting negative results out at the end.
Some of us had earlier done a run along the Cedar Point Chausee, finding promising habitat for shorebirds but only a least sandpiper on the east side, and on the west side at least 500 tundra swans, numerous indeterminable waterfowl, and clouds of gulls at unreachable distances. After Huron, we skipped some minor stopping points and visited several spots in the Lorain harbor, where birds numbered in many thousands, with passing skeins of red-breasted mergansers enclosing clouds of gulls. Here a glimpse at a possible little gull and a possible tern species kept us on point for a while, and a weedy field caused us to look for odd sparrows, but when novelties were not spotted we moved on.
Avon Lake power plant was the next stop. Here, the warm water outflow had gathered huge numbers of gulls, and we happily sorted through them, finding four lesser black-backed gulls but nothing rarer, even though the proportion of ring-billed gulls was pretty small. Other than red-breasted mergansers and a few mallards, no waterfowl were present. Our entire lakeside trip furnished very few of the latter, some of the more interesting at our next stop in Rocky River, where surf and black scoters were bobbing around unsatisfactorily far off in the waves. Here we saw our only robins, which have been very skimpy in numbers this fall. The strange rapid passage westward of mergansers continued here, as it did for the rest of our visit.
Another power plant, at Eastlake, was our next stop. Here again diversity was lacking. Gulls were few, though a nice cohort of Bonaparte’s cycled around just a few yards away, and a few hundred other gulls snoozed on the piers. Here the mergansers dominated, with several thousand loafing in the water while ten feet above them seemingly endless waves others passed by, aimed at some inscrutable destination to the west. During the day, I estimated we saw at least 35-40 thousand passing westward along the shore. We called local informants to find out if a trip farther east to Headlands Beach SP, and were told that people we knew were driven off by hunters intentionally firing over their heads, so we of course chose to give up on the shore, heading homeward and stopping at Lake Medina to actually walk beneath trees on our way to see new waterfowl species on the lake, framed by distant McMansions.
Because our focus was narrow, our list is shorter than it might have been, but we felt we had to give the waterbirds a chance. Too bad for them, their numbers were not encouraging, and it seemed we’d have to wait still longer for the seasons to change.
Our modest list of 46 species follows:
Canada goose
Tundra swan
American wigeon
Mallard
Canvasback
Ring-necked duck
Greater scaup
Lesser scaup
Surf scoter
Black scoter
Bufflehead
Common goldeneye
Hooded merganser
Red-breasted merganser
Ruddy duck
Common loon
Horned grebe
Double-crested cormorant
Turkey vulture
Bald eagle
Red-tailed hawk
American kestrel
American coot
Least sandpiper
Bonaparte’s gull
Ring-billed gull
Herring gull
Lesser black-backed gull
Great black-backed gull
Tern sp.
Rock pigeon
Mourning dove
Red-bellied woodpecker
Downy woodpecker
Hairy woodpecker
Blue jay
American crow
American robin
European starling
American pipit
American tree sparrow
Song sparrow
Northern cardinal
House finch
American goldfinch
House sparrow