June 8th dawned warm and foggy for a hardy band of six Avid Cowpokes headed for a weekend roundup in uttermost northwestern Ohio, a trip of near-Conneautian proportions for folks from the Columbus area. Our genial leader du jour, Jeff Grabmeier, is a native of the area, and renowned for his discoveries in relatively unbirded Williams County, up where you can be in any of three states if you turn the right—or the wrong—way.
Our drive up to the first stop, nearly 3 ½ hours, provided more than ample time for speculations about birds from the West, speculations that grew increasingly wild as we neared our goal—sure, we’d see lark sparrows and western meadowlarks aplenty, and probably lark buntings and western kingbirds, but what about kites, ferruginous hawks, cinnamon teals, white-faced ibises, western tanagers? For many of us, the destination was as exotic as Council Bluffs or Platte. Our first stop was at a Boy Scouts camp’s HQ in Williams County, where Jeff was able to persuade the anxious caretakers—no easy job in view of our appearance—that we would not be making off with Scouts to barbecue them at some remote part of the property, whereupon we were on our way. Our target species was a “Brewster’s” warbler located earlier, and after some wandering one was found when Bob starting waving his arms in the well-known way.
This was the first rain-free day in weeks, it seemed, and Williams Countians were out mowing like crazy everywhere, but we were able to bird a yet-uncut field for bobolinks and some good looks at Henslow’s sparrows, and evade the tractors and mowers to a few more spots for good birds, culminating in a western meadowlark Jeff had earlier found along his BBS route in the southwestern part of the county. Like all the western meadowlarks of recent years in Ohio, this one was a male vainly singing for a female who would never hear his threnodies, and will do this for two or three years till he is seen no more, probably expired of a broken heart.
We zipped down to Paulding County then, where we checked out the newly-flooded Thomas Wetlands, finding nearly all our migrants of the day: shorebirds, including a fetching female Wilson’s phalarope, a ruddy turnstone, a semipalmated sandpiper, a semipalmated plover, half a dozen pectoral sandpipers, and no fewer than 28 white-rumped sandpipers all in a single flock. Also present were a shoveler and a few dickcissels, as well as a vesper sparrow, one of 10 sparrow species for the day.
We leaped time and space again to appear in Oak Openings Metro Park, where after only a while we had excellent looks at no fewer than five lark sparrows. Our cowboys then found a lemon-yellow bird with a blotchy red head and neck just across the road. Blood pressures reached clinical proportions as field guides and collective memories were consulted. Well, nobody had noticed any wing-bars…but it didn’t sound like one of our eastern tanagers. We asked a passing sheriff’s officer if we could trespass, and several CDs and players were deployed. Finally the bird was caught pitty-tucking, and we had to admit it was a summer tanager in transitional plumage, not a bad bird for northern Ohio, but somewhat short of our heated imaginings. After a pleasant interlude with a mix of species from the south and species from the north—but none from the west—on a walk near the Lodge, we called a halt to the day’s birding.
A sleep-deprived but hangover-free gang began Sunday by walking the boardwalk at Irwin Prairie SNP, where side-by-side comparisons of willow and alder flycatchers were made, a nice pair of yellow-billed cuckoos made unaccustomedly obvious appearances, and we confirmed that no migrants were around. Stopping next at Maumee Bay State Park, we fluffed the list a bit, but didn’t see any migrants there either. Mallard Club Marsh’s vegetation had grown so luxuriantly as to hide any garganeys, cinnmon teals, or Eurasian wigeons it may have harbored, but we improved our list, adding among others several doo-doo-doos from least bitterns.
Maybe western stray dogies were no longer likely, we at last admitted, but surely we could pick up some late migrants like Connecticut and mourning warblers, olive-sided flycatchers, etc., at Magee Marsh. A brief listen outside the woods was not encouraging, and soon after we’d entered I nailed a bright gold doubloon to the trunk of a boxelder, and announced that it would go to the first Avid Birder to discover a true migrant along the bird trail that day. As it happened, I was able to keep the doubloon, as I was later to stumble upon the only true migrant six of us, wandering around at different times, were able to find that day, a yellow-bellied flycatcher, which I additionally misidentified as a “yellow-throated flycatcher.”
Such disappointments split up our hardy posse at this point, though they did not of course daunt our spirits. The trio of Avids I accompanied stopped at Killdeer Plains on the way back, in search of the twice-reported pair of king rails there. The spot where the rails had been found seemed to have been mowed—probably by Wildlife employees heedless of non-game species—and we dipped on this one. We made a cursory search of the ponds, still looking for cinnamon teals and white-faced ibises from the west, but came up short. But it was an excellent trip overall, and without any extraordinary efforts merely to expand the list, we came up with 120 species, as follows:
