Thirteen Avid Birders ignored the weather and various sports spectacles on October 9 to look for birds of the season. It was a good time of year to hope for rare birds over the waters of Lake Erie – jaegers, odd gulls, etc – but prevailing southerly winds made them even less likely. Since it was also a prime time of year for sparrows, common and rare, and for other later migrants during a period when the insectivorous ones overlap with those who prefer seeds and fruits, we made them our quarry for the day. We ran ahead of rain slowly moving north to start our day at Gordon Park impoundment in Cleveland, a large overgrown area once devoted to containing dredge spoil on the Lakeside. After some more conventional birding which produced large numbers of migrating chimney swifts and blue jays overhead, and a couple of nice orange-crowned warblers feeding on goldenrod (apparently a favored food source for this species), we formed ourselves into a line and walked across several likely-looking fields in hopes of flushing shyer sparrows into view. We did see plenty of sparrows: song, savannah, white-crowned, white-throated, swamp, Lincoln’s, field, American tree, and junco-hopping from the acres of smartweed, lamb’s-quarters, thornapple, and-yes-tomatoes. Near the end of our stay Steve strayed unsupervised from our customarily well-disciplined group and lucked into a Le Conte’s sparrow, a wonderful find the rest of us couldn’t relocate, perhaps understandably as by this time we were a pretty scary-looking bunch for a bird far from home.
We went next to Lorain, where the same wiles were employed, our forces spread over the fields in a l00-yard long line bent like an apostrophe, briefly interrupting feeding sparrows in hopes of glimpsing the scarcer Ammodramus species on the rocks of the surrounding breakwall, out where we might recognize them as birds instead of brownish blurs skimming the weeds before diving to the ground. As at Gordon Pk, we saw hundreds of sparrows, along with sora and Virginia rails and the ubiquitous ‘butter-butts’ (yellow-rumped warblers) fleeing before our advance. Unfortunately, only the commoner species appeared. Finally, mud-smeared and sweat-soaked, bedecked with cockleburs, we accepted defeat. We’d picked up an eleventh sparrow species, fox sparrow, but little more.
Our final stop was in the Huron area, where we abandoned sparrows in favor of more cooperative birds. Along the old Cedar Point causeway we saw once more our single shorebird species for the day-guess which-the standard gulls and waterfowl of the season, and a flyover osprey. A misty drizzle began as we birded the woods at Sheldon Marsh State Nature Preserve, and a fallout of migrants greeted us: more swifts, hundreds of swallows, and as many ducks overhead, as well as lots of warblers and kinglets and creepers and nuthatches, the whole retinue of early October in Ohio. We ended the day having seen lots of birds-hundreds each of several species-but our total species count ended at 80, even counting the traditional roadside silhouettes on the drive back home. Esprit de corps was maintained throughout, even among three first-timers who must have wondered if we do crazy stuff like this every trip, and we look forward to November and a whole new cast of avian characters.
Total Species: 80
A = Gordon Park
B = Lorain Harbor
C = Sheldon Marsh
R = Seen en route to that location
