Our customary January plans to scour the Erie lakefront were abandoned when we saw an unpleasant weather forecast, along with numerous subpar reports from the customary venues up there. Encouraged by some earlier scouting, we set out instead on a short itinerary involving woods and reservoirs close to home.
Two hours of darkness is handy when we can greet the sunrise at E. 72nd Street in Cleveland, but a more leisurely pace is called for when the first stop is only an hour away. We impatiently watched a cloudy dawn gather at the Harveysburg boat ramp at Caesar Creek SP, listening to birds wake up and peering ineffectually at a large raft of waterfowl in a narrow lead of open water half a mile off. We explored some tortuous back roads to get closer to the raft, without better views, then went to the visitor center where more common wintering birds were duly studied in the woods, the open dam pool, and at the feeders, including a handful of ducks, a grebe, and a nice flock of purple finches.
We continued our growing raptor list along the way to Spring Valley WA, and used the blind there to good advantage to pick up sparrows (including fox), blackbirds (including rusty), etc. at close range at the feeders. We took back roads over to Wilmington, seeing more raptors, but no new field birds beyond horned larks. My car was the first to arrive at the Melvin quarry pits, where we began a lengthy scrutiny of the thousands of waterfowl there, which included many mallards and black ducks, small numbers of several other ducks, and several thousand geese, including Canada, cackling, greater white-fronted, and snow (blue and white). At length we got a call from our second vehicle with the news that our third vehicle had been in an accident when it ran into a skidding car north of Wilmington; no one had been hurt, but the car was in a ditch and police and a wrecker were on the way. This took a while, which we took checking out the geese, and finally we heard that the car had been pulled out and hammered into driving shape, and the seven other Avids – especially avid Craig and Sharon and Donna, who’d been in the damaged vehicle – were resuming our outing. They arrived to cheers, and were shown our finds in the quarry’s avian throngs.
We wound our way, without finding very much, through the barren snowy fields of Fayette County to Deer Creek SP, where we found a cooperative merlin and several northern harriers, and some open water near the beach and the dam, where along the edges of the ice shelves we counted (my numbers) no fewer than 74 great blue herons waiting for dinner, some of them standing almost shoulder-to-shoulder in a conga-line of 44. So much for territoriality in a time of dearth.
Next was Darby Creek Metro Park, where we encountered our ninth raptor species, a handsome rough-legged hawk, then parked the vehicles and walked into the grasslands to await the appearance of feeding short-eared owls. The latter appeared, after a long wait in increasing cold and fog, at 5:33 pm, with at least three seen, after which we returned to the home fires to relish a January trip with 60 species, even though we had seen not a single gull all day. The day list follows:
Pied-billed grebe 2
Great blue heron 80+
Greater white-fronted goose 1
Snow goose 24
Canada goose several thousand
Cackling goose 4-5
Gadwall
American black duck
Mallard
Northern pintail
Redhead
Ring-necked duck
Ruddy duck
Bald eagle
Northern harrier 5
Sharp-shinned hawk 2
Cooper’s hawk
Red-shouldered hawk 3
Red-tailed hawk
Rough-legged hawk
American kestrel 7
Merlin
American coot
Rock dove
Mourning dove
Short-eared owl
Belted kingfisher
Red-bellied woodpecker
Downy woodpecker
Northern flicker
Blue jay
American crow
Horned lark
Carolina chickadee
Tufted titmouse
White-breasted nuthatch
Carolina wren
Golden-crowned kinglet
Eastern bluebird
American robin
Northern mockingbird 3
European starling
Yellow-rumped warbler
Eastern towhee
American tree sparrow
Fox sparrow
Song sparrow
White-throated sparrow
White-crowned sparrow
Dark-eyed junco
Snow bunting
Red-winged blackbird
Rusty blackbird
Common grackle
Brown-headed cowbird
Purple finch
House finch
American goldfinch
House sparrow