A cool clear morning brought lots of chips and zips from overflying migrants at our Worthington rendezvous, encouraging us to expect much from our September trip, which in recent years has evolved to a trip devoted to migrant passerines in the morning and shorebirds in the afternoon. We’ve come to like the varied woodland, marsh, and shore habitats at Sheldon Marsh State Nature Preserve – as well as the prohibition of hunting for this time of year – for the former. For the latter, shorebirds are by nature less predictable, but this year we planned, based on reports received, to visit Sandy Ridge MP in North Ridgeville and the dredge-spoil impoundment at Lorain.
After a variably pleasant drive north – in which your narrator thought to avoid detours along two traditional routes, but instead found only a third detour – eight of us began the day walking the west side of the woods at Sheldon. About midway we found swarms of warblers, vireos, flycatchers, etc. high in trees overhead. Most were visible only in the leafless sections of the trees, and an urge to get closer brought us directly beneath them, where we quickly suffered from ‘warbler neck’ but enjoyed ourselves. The strain persuaded us to move on to the lower trees farther along the road, or the willows near the point, but alas this was to be the only good action we found all day for warblers, although we had a pleasant walk with occasional finds the rest of the way.
Some scouting had revealed that the Cedar Point Chaussee, about a mile west, had shorebirds the previous evening, so we unloaded passengers and gear and took the mostly annoying and often dangerous walk out to the viewpoint. Here we quickly found the stars of the show, two juvenile marbled godwits, wading in the shallows, and a suite of other shorebirds of similar habitats-both dowitchers, yellowlegs, stilt sandpipers, pectoral sandpipers, along with a few peeps on the mudflats. Unlike warblers, they neither flew away or hid behind things, and we did not have to satisfy ourselves with glimpses of their underparts.
Sandy Ridge was jammed on a sunny Saturday, in part by a herpetological show that seemingly consisted mostly of serpent handling, but the presence of lots of humans did not seem to have inconvenienced the nice numbers of shorebirds filling various habitat niches in the large marshland we encountered after an uneventful half-mile walk through the old woods. We walked another half-mile along the edge of the marsh, again and again finding new groups of shorebirds and waterfowl, in the intervals amusing ourselves with the antics of red-headed woodpecker adults and young in the dead trees on the opposite side. We got excellent looks at twelve shorebird species, and enhanced the experience of local birders who’d brought only binoculars with numerous stunning views through our spotting scopes. As always, the only thing more thrilling than finding and observing an unusual bird was showing it to someone else who appreciates it.
The Lorain impoundment was signed as a dangerous construction zone, but we walked out anyway, as everyone else has been doing. Toppled trees, piles of debris, bulldozer tracks and shapeless mounds of raw earth were everywhere. Only a few eclipse-plumaged ducks were in evidence, and we called a friend to pinpoint the location where shorebirds had been being seen. We were told we were standing in it. Four semipalmated sandpipers circled uncertainly for a while, and finally set down on the shore. We pulled up stakes and drove to some observation points for the harbor, and saw only Canada geese and small roosts of gulls. It started to rain. As I thought back over it, the reports we’d read about birds at Lorain had not been all that great, certainly nothing like those from Sandy Ridge, and perhaps we’d been victims – again – of the area’s outstanding past, rather than its rather more seedy present. Best to return here later with cold weather’s waterbirds.
We’d had a pretty good trip, with leisurely walks through some beautiful spots before the end; a couple of our participants, victims of sore limbs, were limping a bit by the end, but game. Our day list, despite the limited habitats we explored (this is the first trip in a long time with no song sparrow, and we didn’t find a goldfinch till the afternoon), included a respectable 85 species, fifteen of them shorebirds seen and studied very well in good light, and eleven wood warblers, a few of them glimpsed only well enough to identify, which reminded most of us to review that invaluable section (pp 104-6) in Dunn & Garrett’s “Warblers” illustrating the rear-ends of all the North American species.
Here’s the trip list:
Canada goose
Mute swan
Wood duck
Mallard
Blue-winged teal
Northern shoveler
Northern pintail
Green-winged teal
Pied-billed grebe
Double-crested cormorant
Great blue heron
Great egret
Green heron
Turkey vulture
Cooper’s hawk
Red-tailed hawk
American kestrel
American golden-plover
Semipalmated plover
Killdeer
Solitary sandpiper
Greater yellowlegs
Lesser yellowlegs
Marbled godwit
Semipalmated sandpiper
Lesat sandpiper
Baird’s sandpiper
Pectoral sandpiper
Stilt sandpiper
Short-billed dowitcher
Long-billed dowitcher
Wilson’s snipe
Ring-billed gull
Herring gull
Caspian tern
Rock pigeon
Mourning dove
Great horned owl
Common nighthawk
Chimney swift
Red-headed woodpecker
Red-bellied woodpecker
Downy woodpecker
Northern flicker
Eastern wood-pewee
Least flycatcher
Eastern phoebe
Great crested flycatcher
Yellow-throated vireo
Red-eyed vireo
Blue jay
American crow
Tree swallow
Northern rough-winged swallow
Barn swallow
Black-capped chickadee
Tufted titmouse
White-breasted nuthatch
Carolina wren
Marsh wren
Blue-gray gnatcatcher
American robin
Gray catbird
European starling
Cedar waxwing
Nashville warbler
Chestnut-sided warbler
Black-throated blue warbler
Black-throated green warbler
Bay-breasted warbler
Blackpoll warbler
Black-and-white warbler
American redstart
Ovenbird
Common yellowthroat
Wilson’s warbler
Field sparrow
Lincoln’s sparrow
Northern cardinal
Rose-breasted grosbeak
Red-winged blackbird
Common grackle
Brown-headed cowbird
American goldfinch
House sparrow