Avid Birders trip leaders like a surprise as much as the next guy, but ours is the art of the expected. What good are we, after all, if all everyone did was carpool off as whim dictated, looking for marvelous birds and events to happen helter-skelter?
No, we must regularize things, temper wild hopes with sober reality, try to look ahead. Weather radars, maps, field reports, the precise locations of clean bathrooms, and intelligence from our vast network of informants are our stock in trade, not the vagaries of happenstance, or the fevered anticipations of untrammeled surmise. We are bureaucrats, not dreamers—functionaries, not adventurers. Our product is not fantasy or gambles against the odds or excuses. Our product is the Plan.
For the 8 December trip, the Plan was well-founded, dug deep into definite data. We’d even projected a low turnout—there were only eight of us this time—because of the weather forecast and the increasingly predictable presence of the state’s first brown-headed nuthatch up in Geauga County. It would be chilly and uncomfortable near Lake Erie, with easterly winds at 10-15 knots turning northeast by afternoon, accompanied by rain and probably snow. Gulls and waterfowl would be numerous, winter finches widespread if erratic, and a couple of good late-season shorebirds—red phalarope and purple sandpiper—had been frequently reported in the area. Jaegers, up to five of them, had been at Rocky River for nearly two weeks, and there were intriguing recent reports of brants. We’d start at Huron, then go as far eastward as time allowed, perhaps as far as Fairport Harbor.
As it turned out, gulls, though indeed numerous, tended to be white flecks like wind-driven dandruff halfway to Canada most of the time, mostly because the anticipated northeasterly winds—which would have been the first in weeks—never developed, and the Lake stiffened up like gray-green gelatin as the day progressed. Waterfowl, in a period that should have been prime time, were hard to find, both for us and for the Nimrods whose guns bristled from every Lakefront blind at nearly every stop. Shots fired often seemed to outnumber huntable birds present. We never felt a drop or flake of the promised precipitation.
The phalarope-free zone of the Huron impoundment was decorated instead with decoys, including one of the laughable new wheeling-wings electric models. Thousands of yards of breakwalls were scanned, without a purple sandpiper to show for it. Rocky River was bereft of jaegers, but did afford a high enough prospect to see that jillions of birds apparently lacked the gumption to enter US waters. Here we decided to abandon the glaucous bathwater of the Lake along with the Plan, and turn south.
Not that we didn’t have some unPlanned adventures along the way. Easterly winds at Huron made for choppy water, obliterating the loafing-bar along the walkway and keeping untold thousands of gulls in flight as far as the eye could see. A tiny proportion of them were close enough to shore to check out, and an immature gull with way too much black on its upperwings, but otherwise resembling a Bonaparte’s gull, shifted in and out of view a few times; we were never able to persuade ourselves that its bill was anything but black, however. Troy was eventually among those who tired of looking for it, and saw a bird he thought might have been a mallard enter the killing zone of the impoundment and touch down not far away. Shots, predictably enough, rang out, and it slumped, legs kicking. More shots came as we turned, and the bird, now still, was retrieved by a hunter, and we could see it was a first-year brant. Troy, delighted, announced he was now two species ahead in his titanic struggle for a bigger Ohio list with Brian Barchus. Brad was a bit stung because he’d hoped for a brant today to add to his own list, but hadn’t seen anything of the bird but its dangling corpse. He and Troy amused us all with a day-long good-natured argument about the niceties of listing rules, about life-lists and death-lists, about whether it made a difference if one identifies a bird or merely sees it before its demise, etc.
The Plan was dissolving. Our journey continued as one stop after another searching through the familiar common species—no good finches at Old Woman Creek or the Lorain impoundment, no gulls beyond the Big Four anywhere, only a handful of distant ducks—until we got to Avon Lake Power Plant. Here Troy found a snowy owl before everyone was out of the vehicles, and we showed it to a couple of birders who’d just arrived from the far end of the park. They exchanged hot poop: they’d had a jaeger and a glaucous gull there, and we thanked them as we loped off in that direction. The jaeger, a handsome young dark morph, was amazingly enough standing atop the breakwall with herring gulls only 75 yards offshore, looking like the skunk at a family picnic. Actually, he was a beauty, and afforded long looks and numerous photos before he took flight, showing us the rest of his fieldmarks and getting all the indignant gulls up, and after circling twice dashed off to the west. The glaucous gull was lost in the flurry, but we scanned the thousand or so birds on the beach to find an adult lesser black-backed gull among them, and enlarged considerably our mental inventories of plumages, sizes, and bare-parts colorations of Larus argentatus till we could take no more.
Subsequent stops revealed stagnating water, clearing skies, and evermore-distant birds, and we decided to abort a long trip east of Cleveland, and return via two inland reservoirs—Oberlin, where we found a few ducks and many gulls, and Wellington, where in the dying light we found a few gulls and finally many ducks. In between we explored the Wellington Nature Reserve, where we found a patch of varied habitat in the surrounding agricultural land, and a probable barred owl was the best find. We had no shorebirds at the shore, and most of our ducks were found far inland. Our list for the day came to a skimpy 57species, and looked like this:
