Thirty-two Avid Birders, a record number in recent years, gathered in 5:30 a.m.’s gloom on 5 January, and the crowd seemed all the larger for the voluminous clothing in which we were bundled. Perhaps that’s why carpooling reduced our number of vehicles to only 10, but by the end of the day many of us had shed a layer and even went without gloves, as southern winds and clear skies prevailed on this, usually one of the year’s coldest trips. Viewing conditions on the shore were excellent, so bright and balmy that veteran Lake Erie birders thought them way too excellent for finding good birds. We had chosen this trip date nine months earlier, but it was not a mere guess; we consulted revered texts, sacrificed sacred avocados, and took a few whiffs of ancient spirits before we made up our mind. Success was thus guaranteed.
Dawn found us commandeering an entire fast-food restaurant near Medina, where even a few forbidden sit-down breakfasts failed to slow very much our expeditious departure for Geauga County. Throughout the day the sheer size of our force reduced onlookers to respectful admiration, and the neighbors must have thought the Gilberts were having an auction when we took over their place to look for their famous brown-headed nuthatch. It was indeed nippy, but we didn’t need to stay long before the hungry bird made an appearance, and satisfied all but the pickiest of photographers among us, and we may have left before the Gilberts arose to count us among the hundreds who have made the pilgrimage to their back yard.
Fairport Harbor was scenic, and we lined its breakwalls, scopes bristling, alert for all the fabulous birds—gannets, black-headed gulls, purple sandpipers—reported there during the previous week. None appeared, and none was mentioned by local informants we interrogated, but even the usual birds were a treat in the bright, breezy, warming air. A stop by several in a rump group at Lakeshore MP garnered a long-tailed duck and some siskins, and the whole group went to Eastlake Power Plant for more scenery, and what we thought were more of the usual waterbirds (it turned out later others had found some rather rare gulls by spending more time there), and we made for Burke Lakefront Airport, where reports of four or five snowy owls assured us we could find at least one. We ended up finding two, and although they were a long way off, all present were satisfied, including the curious Cleveland police officer who stopped to see what all of the commotion was about. It turns out that the owls were old hat to him as he had added them to his police cruiser list the previous week.
Waterfowl were the order of the day at Rocky River Park and Bradstreet Landing, and the light was good. Hot reports of redpolls at Lakewood Cemetery led us to many long and lugubrious walks in its memorial surroundings, but birds were scarce. A screech owl snoozing in the sun at his roost-hole occasioned an unaccustomed proportion of our attention, in part because no redpolls were to be found. Avon Lake Power Plant followed a trend by now growing familiar—excellent looks at nothing special. The marina at Lorain Harbor was still closed by a little skim of transparent ice, and the docks were empty of birds, but a decent-sized flock out on thicker ice contained a fair number of larger gulls, among them a lesser black-backed gull and a glaucous gull. Some of us had time to stop by Wellington Reservoir on the way home, where a narrow lead of open water still held some diving duck species, glimpsed behind multitudes of Canada geese and a late-arriving pair of snow geese—one blue, one white. All in all, an outing made enjoyable by the less than challenging weather, decent numbers and variety of birds, and a lot of new friends made among new participants from at least three counties well south of Franklin, including Athens and Hamilton. Considering we spent our time in a rural backyard, at the Lakeside, and beside one upground reservoir, our list of 60 species was not bad:
