The end of the nesting season for some birds overlaps the beginning of the fall migration for others. Prominent among the migrants are the shorebirds, numbering forty-seven species on the Ohio list, many of which pass through here on long trips to wintering spots along the coasts and as far away as the tip of South America. A good proportion of these travelers can be found in August, and they were our quarry on this trip.
With rainfall well above normal, places to see these mudflat denizens has been hard to come by in Ohio, but we had some luck when we heard that we could visit a banding station at a remote private property in Sandusky Bay, and also that the Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge was to offer a weekend auto tour to feature some areas they had prepared for shorebird migrants. The Lorain impoundment, a favorite shorebird spot for decades, has recently recovered, and was also hosting good numbers of these migrants.
Twelve of us met before dawn, including three first-time participants. We had toyed with the idea of stopping in at Glacier Ridge MP, where ten or more Virginia rails, three king rails, families of least bitterns of soras and gallinules, and more than a few shorebirds had been seen in the previous week, but we would have had to wait an hour for the gates to open. Instead we set out for southern Ottawa County, and the dikes of western Sandusky Bay, to meet Tom Bartlett’s banding crew at the “Horseshoe.”
Delayed a bit by unanticipated construction work, we eventually found the nets and the netters at work. Shorebirds were present in the mudflats, as wall as a big tern roost. Tom was careful to show us six shorebird species in the process of being banded, and let some of us release them afterward. The roost gave us chances to learn about identifying the juvenile/adult and summer/winter plumages of the common tern species.
Ottawa was crowded, and we crawled behind a lurching rent-a-camper till it got lost and we could get by. A cattle egret actually standing knee-deep in marsh water was an unusual sight. We started seeing shorebirds at area MS6, then others at MS5. The banders had asked us to keep track of any color-marked birds we saw, and we sent them data from five seen here. We may have seen more birders than birds ultimately, but added some species to our list, the best of which was five or so long-billed dowitchers that likely belonged to the nearly-unique molting-migrant population at Ottawa.
A forty-five minute drive to Lorain Harbor was next, and upon our arrival we found that the pool in the impoundment, much smaller than in the good old days, still had good muddy islands and sand bars and was host to half a dozen duck species and more than that of shorebirds. Here we had out first phalarope, western sandpiper, and dunlin. Birders gathered until—again–some of us estimated the line of us along the top of the dike might have outnumbered than of the shorebirds inside. But excellent views were available, even after a Cooper’s hawk strafed the assembled multitude, and we had had good looks at sixteen species for the day by the time we left for the long drive back home. A list of 78 species seen during the day follows.
Canada goose
Wood duck
Mallard
Blue-winged teal
Green-winged teal
Hooded merganser
Ruddy duck
Pied-billed grebe
Double-crested cormorant
Great glue heron
Great egret
Snowy egret
Cattle egret
Green heron
Black-crowned night-heron
Osprey
Bald eagle
Northern harrier
Cooper’s hawk
Red-tailed hawk
Common gallinule
American coot
American crow
Semipalmated plover
Killdeer
Spotted sandpiper
Solitary sandpiper
Greater yellowlegs
Lesser yellowlegs
Semipalmated sandpiper
Western sandpiper
Least sandpiper
White-rumped sandpiper
Pectoral sandpiper
Dunlin
Stilt sandpiper
Short-billed dowitcher
Long-billed dowitcher
Wilson’s snipe
Wilson’s phalarope
Bonaparte’s gull
Ring-billed gull
Herring gull
Caspian tern
Common tern
Forster’s tern
Rock pigeon
Mourning dove
Belted kingfisher
Northern flicker
Eastern wood-pewee
Willow flycatcher
Eastern kingbird
Warbling vireo
Blue jay
American crow
Purple martin
Tree swallow
Northern rough-winged swallow
Bank swallow
Barn swallow
Black-capped chickadee
White-breasted nuthatch
American robin
Gray catbird
Brown thrasher
European starling
Common yellowthroat
Field sparrow
Song sparrow
Northern cardinal
Indigo bunting
Bobolink
Red-winged blackbird
Common grackle
Brown-headed cowbird
American goldfinch
House sparrow