It shouldn’t have happened. At least we shouldn’t have had to do it. We pride ourselves on birding in Ohio on our monthly trips. Admittedly that’s making a virtue of necessity, since from Columbus other states are a hefty distance away. But the good birds weren’t showing up in Ohio, and even the almost-good ones have often eluded us recently.
So we did some trespassing. Maybe we even dishonored tradition. In a word, we poached. A tufted duck* was only an hour north of the border, so fifteen of us drove up that way, where five or six Michigan birders joined us in scanning for the bird among over a thousand local ducks. Greg Balson, modest to a fault as always, found the bird about 9 a.m., saying “It just swam into my scope view,” and we lingered to watch it feeding just a few feet off the near-shore ice.
Unable to shake a discernible feeling of having betrayed our heritage–even though for nine of us, including some veteran listers, it was a life bird for the ABA Area and a reason to celebrate–we spun on our heels and headed back to Ohio. We often jokingly chide Michigan birders who come down in droves when we have a good bird in Ohio, and we talked about whether we should smear mud on our license plates and wear sunglasses till we were safely back in Toledo.
The rest of the morning was spent in the northwest, at Pearson Metropark, near the Bayshore Power Plant, and at Maumee Bay State Park. None of the recently-reported rarities was present, but ducks were numerous off Bayshore Road. Since the light was excellent, nothing of great interest was found among them, however (I should say that not everyone recognizes the cause-and-effect relationship between the latter two facts, but it’s established to our satisfaction). Species realistically hoped for but unfound: yellow-headed blackbird, Iceland gull, scoters of any species, oldsquaw, snowy owl, northern shrike. Lapland longspur, n. saw-whet owl; I could go on, but it might be depressing for sensitive readers.
We did see numerous flocks of snow buntings, buffeted around by the 30-mph winds that grew dangerous as the day grew older. The marshes were frozen, and our searches for shrikes and owls were in vain. White birds in flocks of huddled Canada geese always turned out to be domestic geese, and house sparrows were bullying their betters away from the feeders. Three of our number, with real lives back home, peeled off early, planning a stop at Castalia. The rest of us soldiered on to Sheldon Marsh State Nature Preserve, where less-deserving birders had easily been finding a saw-whet owl. But not us, and the outing slid to a halt in a foot of drifting snow in trackless rural Erie County, our eyes tired from scanning the longspurless fields. All in all, though, a trip made memorable by a genuine rarity, and for some of us enlivened by the guilty pleasure of having stepped out of bounds a bit in order to see it.
Our day-list, though it reached a respectable 55 species (and the rump-group visitng Castalia may have had as many as five more), is with the one notable exception an exercise in anticlimax, but here it is. Birds seen only in Michigan are so noted, with M.
* Web author’s note: After careful scrutiny by many observers and experts in the field, the proposed tufted duck was determined to be a hybrid of some sort. They are still trying to figure out what the parent tufted duck mated with to create this abberant offspring. Sorry to rain on any parades.
