With unaccustomed prescience, we chose a day for our August trip that interrupted a period of rains, dawning bright and dry and gently breezy. Shorebirds were our quarry for the day, birds of big wide-open country full of sky and broad wetlands and prairie, birds that don’t hide in the shadows or dart about nervously in the foliage. These are migrants that mostly shuttle back and forth between the Arctic and remote marshes and beaches to the south, prodigious flyers indifferent to humans, with few exceptions only brief visitors to Ohio.
Nine of us spent our first two hours at Killdeer Plains, watching the dawn come up and listening to the brief August early chorus of songbirds, never seeing another human being in a vast landscape of fall flowers and still waters. It seemed every tree had a patient raptor – one tree had a kestrel, an eagle, and a red-tail, each with a different agenda as to prey. The prairies, often studded with drifts of bright flowering plants, (but where did all that teasel come from, all of a sudden?) sheltered grassland birds that seldom showed themselves or sang loudly, but the expected species were detected. Even the ubiquitous song sparrows were undemonstrative, but yellowthroats and yellow warblers, willow flycatchers and kingbirds, meadowlarks and swallows were all in good voice. The waterfowl were mostly wood ducks in drab attire, but we saw some marsh birds, and our first few shorebirds.
The sky remained magnificent all day, with shifting cumulus clouds occasionally interrupting the brilliant sunlight. The air was dry, the breeze refreshing. We did a peremptory circuit of the Upper Sandusky reservoir, finding little but a lone cormorant, then walked the boardwalk at Springville Marsh after a pleasant talk with Tom Bartlett at his banding operation, finding our first concentration of shorebirds at the drying wetland at the end of the trail. 
We then took a pleasant drive through farm country to Ottawa NWR, where we undertook the four-mile route we’ve come to call the “Death March,” but which on this glorious day was a walk through a landscape of fall wildflowers. Most of the birdsong had ceased for the day, leaving mostly the persistent chatter of wrens and tittering of sparrows. In the outermost impoundment we found pretty good numbers of shorebirds in splendid light, often fairly close, and indulged ourselves fully in admiring these long-distance travelers gorging themselves in the mudflats and shallows among creamy lotus blossoms. We saw maybe a dozen other humans, all of them birders. Some of them were even amusing. All the shorebirds, several hundred of them, were adults, the first (and who knows, after an unusually wintry northern summer, perhaps the only) to sweep across the land. We had plenty of opportunities to watch the progress of their molt vs. the intact feathers of those who change their plumages only once they reach the wintering grounds.
Terns and gulls and other waders lent variety. We puzzled for a while at a juvenile snowy egret, something we don’t often see in Ohio, and got good looks at a nice adult little blue heron. The only raptors I can recall were bald eagles, and Canada geese were refreshingly scarce. It was a lovely walk, still long enough that we were a bit weary and thirsty near the end.
After indulging ourselves a bit at our three venues, we found time too short to undertake even lightning visits to some other shorebird spots we’d contemplated, so we headed home in time for supper. Our day list was not a long one, and some of the birds were only half-hearted songs emerging from weedy fields, but we were well satisfied with those found in the limited spectrum of habitats visited.
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The list of 78 species follows:
Canada goose
Wood duck
Mallard
Northern shoveler
Pied-billed grebe
Double-crested cormorant
Great blue heron
Great egret
Snowy egret
Little blue heronGreen heron
Black-crowned night-heron
Bald eagle
Cooper’s hawk
Red-tailed hawk
American kestrel
Semipalmated plover
Solitary sandpiper
Greater yellowlegs
Lesser yellowlegs
Semipalmated sandpiper
Least sandpiper
Pectoral sandpiper
Stilt sandpiper
Short-billed dowitcher
Long-billed dowitcher
Ring-billed gull
Herring gull
Caspian tern
Common tern
Rock pigeon
Mourning dove
Chimney swift
Ruby-throated hummingbird
Belted kingfisher
Red-bellied woodpecker
Downy woodpecker
Northern flicker
Eastern wood-pewee
Willow flycatcher
Eastern phoebe
Great crest flycatcher
Eastern kingbird
Red-eyed vireo
Blue jay
American crow
Horned lark
Purple martin
Tree swallow
N. rough-winged swallow
Bank swallow
Barn swallow
Carolina chickadee
Black-capped chickadee
House wren
Sedge wren
Marsh wren
American robin
Gray catbird
European starling
Cedar waxwing
Yellow warbler
Common yellowthroat
Chipping sparrow
Field sparrow
Vesper sparrow
Grasshopper sparrow
Henslow’s sparrow
Song sparrow
Swamp sparrow
Northern cardinal
Indigo bunting
Red-winged blackbird
Eastern meadowlark
Common grackle
Brown-headed cowbird
American goldfinch
House sparrow