I wasn’t facing facts, I guess. Looking at the calendar, 12 March seemed like a pretty good time to greet the returning birds of spring, to share the sense of renewal and hope and excitement they bring us. As we laid out our plans, an urge to go south to meet them was hard to resist, and I urged various marshes, lakes, forests and plains of southwestern Ohio as a place to do so. So we announced an itinerary that was to include Springfield’s giant crow roost at first light, and adventures for ducks and cranes and sparrows in various classic spots and little-known hidey-holes, even a search for a rare loggerhead shrike reported not too long ago.
Cooler minds and colder temperatures quickly prevailed, however. While a change of plans would not encourage a favorable opinion of our decisiveness and command of the intelligence, it was the right thing to do. Spring was only a promise. Temperatures had flirted with freezing by day, and reverted to the teens each night. Ice, sullen and pockmarked with age, sealed still water in most places. That the state’s two rarest birds were only an hour apart in Carroll and Wayne counties proved irresistible, and a revised plan was announced at the last minute.
Many of our regulars had driven off to Texas, in a likely far more successful trip to find spring to the south, so we were rather surprised that ten Avids showed up the next morning. And it was off to the frozen north we went, before long encountering heavy snow that slowed us on nearly-empty highways and stopped up our ears when we alit. Three hours brought us to a farmyard and a spruce grove where a varied thrush, a winter vagrant from the Pacific northwest, had been present for several months. Snow in flakes the size of nacho chips swirled to melt on our eyelashes and fill the eyepieces of our binoculars, and I observed this bird’s scientific name Ixoreus naevius signaled its preference for snow; my schoolboy Latin failed me here, for nevius means “snowy,” but naevius means “spotted.” The bird—for soon after a vanload of Amish men and boys arrived it showed up—did not look spotted, though, and now that I’ve found out Ixoreus means “mistletoe” I really have nothing further to say on the subject.
Off into the snow we went, following a loopy course on the bumpy roadways of three counties to Ohio’s largest inland wetland, Killbuck Wildlife Area, where from a grassy knoll high above a stretch of ice water we sought our quarry. The Eurasian wigeon Anas penelope (I looked this one up lest I further mislead. It seems anas is Latin for “duck,” and penelope is Greek for “duck,” leaving little room for misinterpretations) is very rare in Ohio, and while many of us had seen it—in Eurasia, mostly—some had not encountered it in Ohio. Nor did we encounter it this day. A lot of ducks were around, though, enough to lower our core temperatures noticeably before we gave up. We know when to give up. Then we look around a little more.
We’d run into a couple of local experts who were making the rounds (this was their sixth fruitless trip to this windy hill to seek duck-duck), who were willing to let us tag along, and we set off, winding down innumerable back roads and Amish farms with blackbird flocks and geese of inscrutable parentage, lanes and lakes and woodlots and owlish fields, peat-farms and flooded forests and a shaky platform overlooking over a thousand pintails, a coursing male harrier, and four sandhill cranes full of spring enthusiasm, till we were done.
We stopped at a couple of lakes that lay along our back road home, where at Pleasant Hill we watched six eagles—calling this species “endangered” is kinda quaint these days, glad to say—over the lake at once, a flock of turkeys for whom we had to give way in the roadway, a park ranger who had nothing better to do than follow us around in bewilderment at what we were doing, and big distant rafts of diving ducks and migrant ring-billed gulls. A wrong turn took us to Knox Lake, with more ducks and amorous herons. Thence to a mere forty miles of interstate and the warmth of home, bearing a day’s list of 63 species, very light on the spring birds except for waterfowl. Here it is:
Pied-billed grebe
Horned grebe
Great blue heron
Turkey vulture
Canada goose
Mute swan
Tundra swan
Wood duck
Gadwall
American wigeon
American black duck
Mallard
Northern shoveler
Northern pintail
Green-winged teal
Canvasback
Redhead
Ring-necked duck
Greater scaup
Lesser scaup
Bufflehead
Hooded merganser
Common merganser
Red-breasted merganser
Bald eagle
Northern harrier
Sharp-shinned hawk
Cooper’s hawk
Red-tailed hawk
Rough-legged hawk
American kestrel
Wild turkey
Sandhill crane
Killdeer
Ring-billed gull
Herring gull
Rock pigeon
Mourning dove
Red-bellied woodpecker
Downy woodpecker
Northern flicker
Blue jay
American crow
Horned lark
Carolina chickadee
Tufted titmouse
White-breasted nuthatch
Eastern bluebird
American robin
Varied thrush
European starling
American tree sparrow
Song sparrow
White-throated sparrow
White-crowned sparrow
Northern cardinal
Dark-eyed junco
Red-winged blackbird
Eastern meadowlark
Rusty blackbird
Common grackle
American goldfinch
House sparrow