The Avid Birders’ Labor Day trip had its laborious aspects. Nineteen of us drove through clouds that had dropped right down to the deck–as well as through a couple of stop signs we couldn’t see–up to the Lake at Maumee Bay SP. No buff-breasted sandpipers kept their appointments on the lawns there, and no migrants were noted along the nature trail until our loud complaining about the lack of birds apparently disturbed a couple of red-breasted nuthatches, and Blackburnian, Cape May, and magnolia warbelrs along the boardwalk. Shotguns were booming all around us as we drove to Ottawa, where we felt certain many interesting birds were taking refuge.
Ottawa, managed as it currently is, was pretty quiet. The impoundment NW of the pkg lot is being flooded, and harbored a few dozen lesser yellowlegs, two snipe, and a few SB dowitchers, but soon it will be at a depth more convenient for the Refuge’s star, the Canada goose. We saw a total of three swallows in 2 1/2 hours–two barns and a tree–and not a warbler. Sheer ennui on the way out to Crane Creek induced one well-intentioned observer to mistake a pied-billed for a red-necked grebe–that’s how bad it got–and eventually the two Am white pelicans were located, lolling contentedly on a slightly submerged sandbar with gulls and terns. There were mudflats along the creek, but unlike as in past weeks they were mostly empty. Such as they were, shorebird highlights included two black-bellied plovers, small (<10) numbers of semipalmated and least sandpipers, a single sb dowitcher, and two Baird’s sandpipers–less than optimal looks at a distant one and an elusive one. One observer, headed back ahead of the rest of us, found an olive-sided flycatcher just SE of the viewing platform (from which, of course, there was little else to view except two plump exotic trumpeter swans).
Medusa Marsh is being reflooded in the part recently attractive to shorebirds. Many killdeer were around there, a few peep and semi plovers, and, amazingly enough, the durable Am golden-plover, foraging in his usual spot out beyond the old duck-blind. Someone reported seeing someone in an ODW cap spraying loosestrife here recently; the red carpet’s being unrolled here for huntable species, so forget about shorebird habitat after a couple of days.
After an important ice-cream break as temperatures passed 90 degrees, we walked out the Cedar Pt causeway just w. of Sheldon’s Folly. Stiffened NE winds had begun to cover mudflats there, and shorebirds were–as elsewhere today–pretty scarce. We added a solitary and three white-rumped sandpipers, and shovelers and a wigeon brought our waterfowl count to ten species. Further east in the State Nature Preserve, only a few migrants were around, and your humble scribe’s sighting of two ruddy turnstones (our 15th and final shorebird species) met with widespread disbelief from an increasingly surly and incredulous party, at least until they were unequivocally refound. Our last bird of the day, giving us a total of only 82 spp, was–tada–an American crow.
I imagine few birders did a lot better today, as there just wasn’t enough to do. Another flush of migrants seems due, but we scheduled this trip back in April, when we used Tarot cards to choose the date. A species list follows (only for the more interesting species are numbers or sites mentioned).
Trip List
