Early October birding at Lake Erie migrant spots offers many possibilities. A retinue of shorebirds different from September’s has showed up, as have a few later passerines, especially the rarer sparrows. Raptor watching can be very productive. Waterfowl have begun to show up in good numbers, and it’s prime time for Sabine’s gulls, not to mention migrating jaegers.
Nobody–especially birders who have to drive back and forth from central Ohio–has enough time in any given day to explore all these intriguing possibilities, however, so one has to make some choices. Birds are creatures of the air, so considering the weather makes sense. South or west winds are going to expose mudflats for shorebirds. North gales might drive rare water birds within sight. Days of southern wind seemed to have slowed migration from Canada, so maybe winds from the other direction would encourage new arrivals–though winds that are too strong can make it tougher to find them. Thinking these things over made us all feel masters of our fate, as did numerous consultations with weather forecasters at NOAA and the universities, readings from satellites and buoys out in Lake Erie, and multicolored radar images. Not that any of this made much difference when the weather of 6 October dealt us our hand.
The forecasts were for sunny skies in the west, rain in the east, a night of northwest winds, then 30-knot winds out of the west during the day. So our group of ten abandoned a Lake watch, concentrating on shorebirds and whatever dickie-birds the night’s weather may have brought in. It was pretty much windless and chilly at our first stop, the Bird Trail, with very little early activity, so we sidestepped to Ottawa for a walk to the estuary. Lots of dabbling ducks were in, as were multitudinous kinglets, and a few warblers, mostly yellow-rumps and Cape Mays. Shorebird numbers were down there, but plenty remained to keep us occupied for an hour and a half, with sixteen species present, starring a pair of Hudsonian godwits–a new species for four. Killdeers and pectoral sandpipers were surprisingly few, but sanderlings, Pluvialis plovers, and long-billed dowitchers were just as surprisingly many.
Back at the Bird Trail after lunch, we beat the bushes for warblers etc., and found mostly kinglets. Wrens were few, thrushes elusive, and sparrows simply absent. The predicted stiff wind out of the west finally kicked up, keeping birds close to the ground. After a fellow who’d been there all morning bragged about having seen seven species of warblers, we made our loop short and headed east. We had only three vehicles, so a slow drive down the Cedar Pt. Chaussee didn’t disrupt traffic much, and we found the eared grebe that had spent the previous two days there, a new bird for two, and well-seen at close range. Shorebirds were eerily absent at the site, so we nipped over to Sheldon Marsh SNP. A thorough blitz of the woods there produced a fair number of migrants, but nothing extraordinary. At length, offered a couple more stops further east to look for sparrows and gulls, a majority of our weary wanderers voted–rest assured this reversion to democracy will not become a habit–to call it quits. Whether they were footsore, or just eager to get back in time for the OSU football game, was difficult to say. As it turned out, nobody further east saw any Sabine’s gulls or jaegers or sharp-tailed sparrows that day, so our improvisations worked out pretty well, with a trip list of 96 species–counting roadside silhouettes–a list of which follows.
A = Magee Marsh WA
B = Ottawa NWR
C = Sheldon Marsh SNP incl. Cedar Point Chaussee
R = seen en route to that destination.
