Ten of us set forth from the traditional departure point about half an hour late on this muggy day. The leaders had arrived late because of the inexplicable closing of three freeway exits as well as a slow train passing over our route. Our way north was free of obstacles, but we were the last to arrive at our first destination, Winous Point Shooting Club. This venerable location in the wild western end of the Bay, still serves the well-off shooting fraternity (pretty much absent in August), as well as a good deal of wetlands research, and it was a treat to see relatively undegraded marshes, rare in Ohio, and to observe Tom Bartlett’s shorebird banding operation there. Fifteen or so other carloads of birders were already in place under a canopy, watching Tom quickly pluck birds from bags hanging from a carousel of his design, and withdrawing shorebirds to measure, weigh, sex, and age them before carefully handing them over to observers so we could release them. He explained features of these specialized creatures, especially those indiscernible to binoculars, as he did so, and it was a treat to observe these tiny details and adaptations before being handed one, warm and seemingly docile, to toss it into the breeze and watch it wing off over the marsh. We also took the time to study the birds that were not being caught in the nets as they foraged in deep and shallow water, mudflats, and grassy borders nearby.
The banding operation was packing up to move to another location farther west, and we decided to head to Pipe Creek WA rather than going with them. A black-bellied whistling-duck, only Ohio’s second record, had spent the previous two days delighting observers there, and we wanted to join them. On our trip up to Sandusky, the only obstacle was heavy Saturday traffic to the popular Cedar Point amusement park, and I decided the best way to go would be to sneak in from the east, via Rte 6. We quickly discovered a good proportion of the entire population of greater Cleveland had agreed with me, and was inching off the freeway along Rye Beach Road. Anxious to replace and displace fluids, we stopped at a fast-food joint just as its doors were opening at 10 am, and joined the lines. The traffic was moving well enough, and we soon pulled into the Pipe Creek parking lot, where only by using the sparse lawn did we find a place to leave our three vehicles. Obviously a lot of folks had come to see the whistling-duck.
And we quickly met some of them at the head of the trail, the first of whom related the duck had just flown the coop, accompanying some mallards in a flight east and then south. Its present location was unknown. We passed dozens more observers on the way out, all of them happy to tell us the duck had been there, but sad to say it was no longer. About a half mile north, along the dike, maybe fifty folks were standing around looking at the nice collection of shorebirds present, reveling in their recent sighting of the whistling-duck and telling pretty much the same story of how it had flown away. Gradually the happy were replaced by the hopeful, and we passed our time with a nice tern roost, overflying migrants, and a hundred-plus mixed shorebirds feeding in the shallow waters of the impoundment. That done, most of us decided to walk the outside dike of the area to look in for a place where the escapees might have landed. It was in the nineties, humid, and bright, and we didn’t turn up anything. We had exchanged phone numbers with friends who were staying put, everyone vowing to call the rest if the bird was sighted. We ate lunch, where we discussed the possibility of checking tern roosts at a few beaches to the west in hopes of relocating an Arctic tern that had caused a rush of observers two days earlier, but then disappeared. We decided we’d return to Pipe Creek again before we left the Bay, but that in the meantime we’d look into shorebird reports from Pickerel Creek on the south side, keeping phones open in case anyone called to say the duck had returned. Pickerel Creek disappointed, with increased water levels at spots that had earlier been productive. Thunder in a darkening sky discouraged us from any improvisation, and we retreated to an ice-cream factory for consolation. That done, we went back to Pipe Creek. A lot of the same folks were there. The duck was not, but the numbers of terns and shorebirds had increased. We all studied them and swapped stories, and surmises about the possible return of the duck, until we reached, then passed, the time limit we had set ourselves for returning to Columbus by 7 pm.
We set off into sprinkles and grey skies, bidding our companions good luck and goodbye. The next morning we read internet posts from some of them that less than an hour after we’d left, the duck had returned. It was hard not to feel it had purposely avoided us; we intended, after all, only to admire it. We had a nice trip anyway. I’d counted on seeing a lot of dowitchers, but never anticipated actually holding a couple of them. And finding twenty shorebird species was a nice result for these days of diminishing habitat. Our overall total of 75 species was not impressive in itself, but then we never spent time in forested areas or dry fields, etc., just in the marshes. As for that whistling-duck, we decided if we had to assign blame for missing it, it would have to go to the highway department that got us started late in the first place. Our list follows:
Canada goose
Mute swan
Wood duck
Mallard
Blue-winged teal
Hooded merganser
Pied-billed grebe
Double-crested cormorant
Great blue heron
Great egret
Snowy egret
Black-crowned night-heron
Turkey vulture
Bald eagle
Cooper’s hawk
Red-tailed hawk
Common moorhen
American coot
Black-bellied plover
Semipalmated plover
Killdeer
Spotted sandpiper
Solitary sandpiper
Greater yellowlegs
Willet
Lesser yellowlegs
Marbled godwit
Semipalmated sandpiper
Least sandpiper
Baird’s sandpiper
Pectoral sandpiper
Stilt sandpiper
Short-billed dowitcher
Long-billed dowitcher
Wiilson’s snipe
Wilson’s phalarope
Red-necked phalarope
Bonaparte’s gull
Ring-billed gull
Herrring gull
Caspain ter
Common tern
Forster’s tern
Rock pigeon
Monring dove
Chimney swift
Ruby-thraoted hummingbird
Red-headed woodpecker
Northern flicker
Eastern kingbird
Warbling vireo
Blue jay
American crow
Purple martin
Tree swallow
N. rough-winged swallow
Bank swallow
Barn swallow
White-breasted nuthatch
Carolina wren
Marsh wren
American robin
Gray catbird
Brown thrasher
Yellow warbler
Scarlet tanager
Field sparrow
Song sparrow
Northern cardinal
Indigo bunting
Red-winged blackbird
Common grackle
Brown-headed cowbird
American goldfinch
House sparrow