Ten Avid Birders braved beautiful weather, amorous butterflies, and deafening birdsong on a trip to Adams County over the weekend of June 19th. Briefed ahead of time by local experts and advance teams from previous weeks, we saw nearly all sought-after species. Mark Skinner and his family graciously hosted our motley assemblage at their Highland Cty farm, where after some anxious searching a pair of loggerhead shrikes were located at what may be a second nest at the site. Any shrike nesting has come in recent years to be a glass-clinking event in Ohio.
Later, we found a calling male summer tanager at DNAP’s Adams Lake Prairie, along with dozens of Edwards’ hairstreaks (butterflies inevitably became a sub-theme of the trip, so numerous and varied were they in Adams Cty). Henslow’s sparrows were heard in an area managed for them by The Nature Conservancy, then good views of normally-skulky chats, and Adams Cty’s ‘official’ bird, the prairie warbler. Grouse proved hard to find at midday, even at usually reliable spots, and later tales of a “crazy grouse,” that attacked visitors to a local cemetery, could’t be verified.
We found a blue grosbeak (the subtly beautiful female, as opposed to the more gaudy male) across the road from the house of a local birder, who was eager to tell us of a yellow-headed blackbird (!) that had frequented her feeder not long before. Grasshopper sparrows–but alas no bobolinks or dickcissels–were along a road peopled by Amish families, whose farming practices tend to be more bird-friendly.
Deep-woods birds were at times eerily quiet, even at dusk and dawn, and we were lucky to find single singing worm-eating and hooded warblers, and a few Kentuckies; even ovenbirds seemed unusually scarce. At sunset, we easily found singing chuck-will’s-widows and whip-poor-wills at several places, and gawked at unforgettable concentrations of fireflies; we look forward to time exposure photos taken of the latter.
Most of us camped at a remote site provided by TNC, where we heard eastern screech and barred owls, coyotes, and insomniac cuckoos throughout the starlit night. We did some mopping-up the next morning, then headed home via Buck Creek SP near Springfield, where most got good looks at the reported Bell’s vireo there, as well as orchard oriole, then bobolinks in nearby fields. Black vultures, not seen in Adams Cty (their population may still be suffering from an intentional poisoning of a big roost by our species a few years back), where seen along the road on out way to the park.
Participants peeled off for home, till only three of us remained. A check of our count of species came to 97, and we extended the trip a bit with a visit to Hoover Nature Preserve in hopes of reaching three figures for our list. We predicted we’d add prothonotary warbler, double-crested cormorant, and spotted sandpiper with this stop; the sandpiper didn’t show, however, and after a few hopeful (and, of course, fleeting) misidentifications of impossible distant waterfowl–we hadn’t lugged our scopes out onto the now-extensive mudflats there–we called it quits, out on the buggy reeking squishy mud of Hoover Reservoir, and headed homeward after a good outing.
Trip List
All seen in Adams County, except for those indicated otherwise, and only extraordinary numbers noted. Total species = 99.
