Our schedule was tight but tidy. Seasonal expectations and announcements from birders during previous days suggested our route should be an arc across the north and western counties. A Harris’s sparrow had been coming to a Bowling Green back yard; a red phalarope may have been lingering in Toledo, as might a Hudsonian godwit at Maumee Bay, Ammodramus sparrows (Nelson’s and Le Conte’s) at Metzger Marsh and the Lorain impoundment, and if time permitted a stop for a rufous hummingbird at a feeder and the Wellington reservoir on the way home. Glowing reports of thousands of birds in the Crane Creek estuary demanded a stop along the way as well, and thirteen of us—we took extra time setting off hoping for a luckier number!—set about following this lengthy itinerary.
Well over an hour spent waiting for the Harris’s availed us only the common birds of a suburban spot abutting a woodlot and a weedy field. As we were setting off for our next destination, we got a call that a prairie falcon had been found at the Findlay reservoirs. This spot was forty miles back along our morning’s itinerary, but we sped off in pursuit. Nearly there we heard the bird had flown off, and when we arrrived, we found no bird and no observers.
We scanned the breakwalls and noodled around a bit, finding nine Franklin’s gulls but little else, and headed off –for our third trip on a stretch of I-75– to the Lake. In the interim I learned that I had misread a post, and that the target species in Toledo had been a red-necked, not a red, phalarope, so we passed up this more pedestrian bird and also a stop a Maumee Bay since the passage of time argued that birds would have been disturbed by beachgoers on a warm day. Metzger Marsh was also nixed when we were warned that duck-hunting began this day, so we forged on to Ottawa.
Here we undertook the first half of the fabled Death March out along Crane Creek, a long walk from the parking area. It was pretty quiet along the trails, but out in the creek bed we found several thousand birds, and studied them for 45 minutes. It was cloudy and the birds were a good distance off, but still easy enough to make out with scopes. Preset were: herring, ring-billed, and Bonaparte’s gulls, also common, Forster’s, and Caspian terns; shorebirds included golden and black-bellied plovers, killdeers, greater and lesser yellowlegs, semipalmated and pectoral sandpipers, dunlins, and a couple of distant indistinguishable dowitcher spp., but nothing heart-pounding. We picked up some expected migrant waterfowl on the way back. We learned that the praririe falcon had returned at Findlay, but passed on refinding it when we realized that even if it stayed we would have endured a long stretch of I-75 five times had we sought it. The mew gull at Huron had been seen fleeing with its companions when an eagle flew over the flock, and we sped on to Lorain. We are getting used to the terrain in the impoundment there changing radically at least once a year, and found it had changed once more; but patches of smartweed and ponds remained, if not the shorebird habitat. Here we sought these sparrows for quite some time, some of us getting rather unsatisfactorily brief glimpses, others nothing but muddy feet, as the rain began to fall. We had gotten a report of Ross’s goose earlier at Wellington Res, but twilight and heavier rain dissuaded us from visiting these spots.
We had a good time, a lot of traveling and talking, also sampling the season’s offerings of the expected birds, but we had rotten luck with the rarities. The Harris’s was a no-show, and the sparrows at Lorain were unwilling to give many of us good looks. The gull and shorebrd flocks were bounteous but pedestrian. Darkness and rain intervened to deprive us of two other goodies, mostly because of time spent in fruitless chases after other rare ones. During the day two excellent surprising finds—prairie falcon and mew gull—showed up, but as quickly disappeared. Our luck was bad, but as usual comradeship and an unquenchable interest in the more ordinary species enlivened our day. Our day list of 83 species follows.
Pied-billed grebe
Double-crested cormorant
Great blue heron
Great egret
Black-crowned night-heron
Canada goose
Mute swan
Gadwall
American wigeon
American black duck
Northern shoveler
Green-winged teal
Osprey
Bald eagle
Northern harrier
Cooper’s hawk
Red-tailed hawk
American kestrel
American coot
Sandhill crane
Black-bellied plover
American golden-plover
Killdeer
Greater yellowlegs
Lesser yellowlegs
Solitary sandpiper
Semipalmated sandpiper
Pectoral sandpiper
Dunlin
Dowitcher, sp.
Franklin’s gull
Bonaparte’s gull
Ring-billed gull
Herring gull
Caspian tern
Common tern
Forster’s tern
Rock dove
Mourning dove
Belted kingfisher
Red-bellied woodpecker
Yellow-bellied sapsucker
Downy woodpecker
Hairy woodpecker
Northern flicker
Pileated woodpecker
Willow/alder flycatcher
Blue jay
American crow
Horned lark
Tree swallow
N. rough-winged swallow
Black-capped chickadee
Tufted titmouse
Red-breasted nuthatch
White-breasted nuthatch
Carolina wren
Ruby-crowned kinglet
Eastern bluebird
Hermit thrush
American robin
Gray catbird
European starling
Cedar waxwing
Orange-crowned warbler
Yellow-rumped warbler
Common yellowthroat
Eastern towhee
Savannah sparrow
Nelson’s sparrow
Song sparrow
Swamp sparrow
White-throated sparrow
White-crowned sparrow
Dark-eyed junco
Northern cardinal
Red-winged blackbird
Eastern meadowlark
Common grackle
Brown-headed cowbird
House finch
American goldfinch
House sparrow
All photographs courtesy of Earl Harrison