Eighteen of us rendezvoused early on a mercifully cool clear morning with plans to have a look at the first larger waves of adult shorebirds returning from their northern breeding-grounds. With only stragglers thus far here, we sought their presence in Lake Erie shore marshes for a more satisfying experience. A larger than normal proportion of newcomers led to a longer than normal time to squirrel piles of gear into the cars, but eventually we were on the long road to the Sandusky lakeside.
Pipe Creek Wildlife Area lies almost in the shadow of Cedar Point’s very popular amusement park, but few of us were amused by the horrendous traffic surrounding us. A missed turn diverted us into the mainstream, and only with difficulty did we wedge our little contingent onto the alley that leads to Pipe Creek, where we were relieved to find its scraggly woods and vistas of mallow and willow and cattails awaiting its first tourists.
Unit B was drawn down, and a walk along its eastern edge provided pretty good looks at hundreds of shorebirds and larger waders, where we spent an hour and a half sorting them out and sharing observations. The birdlife changed continually: for example, at one point we had nine snowy egrets, and at times none at all. The throngs gradually diminished, but not before we’d had decent looks at them and a number of interesting flybys. Some angry-looking clouds passed over toward the east, and a picturesque waterspout, a novelty for central Ohio urbanites, enthralled everyone for a few minutes. Like all waterspouts, it didn’t last long, but this one is enshrined in numerous cellphones for future enjoyment.
We motored west then, stopping at Medusa Marsh, where the impenetrable wall of phragmites that has hidden it for years had been trimmed. The marsh was a vast vista of open mudflat, but its birdlife had diminished since more favorable reports of the previous day. Not all of us relished standing on the edge of a busy highway with frequent roaring passages of freight trains on the other side of the road, accented by unending volleys of automatic shotgun-sounds emanating from the marsh’s managers, but the avidest held on for a while.
Magee Marsh was next, where visible shorebirds were as sparse as usual, but we walked the new trail leading to the Crane Creek estuary, which marks the border between marshes managed by Ohio and the Federal authorities. The estuary’s twenty-yard wide flow into Lake Erie is one of the few untouched direct connections between the Lake and inland marshes, a smidgeon of natural hydrology allowed to persist, and attracts many birds. When the winds are right, extensive areas of mud are exposed along the Creek and vast numbers of shorebirds rest and feed there, and another group the previous day had witnessed this phenomenon.
This trail had been built only months before, and was new to many of us. Before that time, a walk out to the estuary and back was a trek under hot sun through largely unproductive open marshland at this time of year—called since days immemorial the “Death March”– and we welcomed a chance to look into even a bit of the creek after a walk of just a few hundred yards. This day the same weather that had brought the waterspout had backed up the creek’s flow, and no mudflats were visible. We had good looks, however, at a few shorebirds on the margins and a lot of birds who were more comfortable floating—three species of gulls, including young Bonaparte’s gulls on their first migration, and good-sized aggregations of common, Forster’s, and Caspian terns.
After a brief visit to Metzger Marsh, which featured only coursing swallows and a few loafing waterfowl, but none of the hoped-for black terns, we split into separate parties for the return south, so in the following list I have been able only to add birds found by my carload, which visited Killdeer Plains Wildlife Area along the way. (Editor’s note: three carloads of Avid Birders stopped by Area M of the Hoover Nature Preserve. This area features a boardwalk that extends over a very shallow portion of the reservoir that, at this time of year, turns into extensive mud flats. We were able to add an osprey to the list at this location.) The list of 81 species follows.
Canada goose
Wood duck
Mallard
Blue-winged teal
Hooded merganser
Wild turkey
Pied-billed grebe
Double-crested cormorant
Great blue heron
Great egret
Snowy egret
Little blue heron
Cattle egret
Green heron
Black-crowned night-heron
Turkey vulture
Osprey
Bald eagle
Red-tailed hawk
American kestrel
Sora
Semipalmated plover
Killdeer
Spotted sandpiper
Greater yellowlegs
Lesser yellowlegs
Marbled godwit
Semipalmated sandpiper
Least sandpiper
Baird’s sandpiper
Pectoral sandpiper
Stilt sandpiper
Short-billed dowitcher
Bonaparte’s gull
Ring-billed gull
Herring gull
Capsian tern
Common tern
Forster’s tern
Rock pigeon
Mourning dove
Chimney swift
Ruby-throated hummingbird
Belted kingfisher
Red-bellied woodpecker
Downy woodpecker
Eastern wood-pewee
Eastern phoebe
Great-crested flycatcher
Eastern kingbird
Warbling vireo
Red-eyed vireo
Blue jay
American crow
Blue jay
Horned lark
Tree swallow
N. rough-winged swallow
Bank swallow
Cliff swallow
Barn swallow
Black-capped chickadee
Carolina wren
Marsh wren
Eastern bluebird
American robin
European starling
Cedar waxwing
Yellow warbler
Chipping sparrow
Veskper sparrow
Song sparrow
Northern cardinal
Indigo bunting
Red-winged blackbird
Eastern meadowlark
Common grackle
Brown-headed cowbird
Baltimore oriole
American goldfinch
House sparrow