Cleveland’s lakefront is mostly a bulwark of concrete, looming cranes and bridges and buildings, a maze of blinding lights, bordered offshore by breakwalls of jagged rock. For birds, there are a few parks along the shore that offer a softer landing, a few ritzy neighborhoods with landscaped grounds, and there is Dike 14.
Also answering to the name Gordon Park impoundment, Dike 14 is an 88-acre mostly triangular wedge of land extending into the Lake between Cleveland Lakefront Park and the swank environs of Bratenahl. Anything but a natural setting in origin, it consists of a sturdy breakwall of huge stones and a metal enclosure around a basin into which for decades spoil—mud, sludge, gravel, and other debris—from the dredging of the Cuyahoga River and various localities nearby has been pumped. Those who know the River’s recent history will know this spoil is not pretty stuff. All the same, over the years this Field of Reams has taken on a rather natural look, with groves of willows and box elder and fields of the more aggressive weedy species like smartweed, lamb’s quarters, and so on. Some years ago, before the impoundment was filled with spoil, water collected in a basin here, a singular oasis for shorebirds in the urban setting, and great rarities like sharp-tailed sandpiper were found. Now, it’s mostly dry, and increasingly overtaken by rough vegetation.
But Dike 14 must look pretty good to migrants returning south over Lake Erie , as record numbers of passerines crash-land into its oasis of green along the urban lakefront. Of particular interest to 12 Avid Birders were the more elusive members of the sparrow genus Ammodramus—the Nelson’s sharp-tailed sparrow A. nelsoni and the still more difficult to see Le Conte’s sparrow A. leconteii—that have become annually reported at this spot in October. A windy morning under bruise-colored clouds found us walking the uneven footing of the impoundment, looking for warblers and other migrants in the tossing willows, scanning the rank weeds for flushed sparrows. Nearly three hours of only fair birding, and no Ammodramus, brought us to a small patch of different habitat—a 50-yard wide circle of yellowed grasses underlain by mud and inch-deep water. The sharp-tailed sparrows we see as migrants here are breeders in marshes and wet meadows in Saskatchewan , Manitoba , and north-central U.S. states like Minnesota and North Dakota , and this little patch most resembled that habitat, as well as that they favor in wintering spots, such as in coastal Texas and Florida .
And here we got lucky, flushing two or three sparrows that showed the down-turned tail, spiky like a punk hair-do, and an orange rump as they fluttered to nearby cover. Eventually, by dint of a lot of careful positioning, everyone was able to get a good look at these shy and attractive creatures.
We ate lunch on our way to Sandy Ridge Metro Park in Lorain County , where we ran into Larry Richardson, who allowed us to witness his release of a Virginia rail retrieved that morning from a collision with a building in downtown Cleveland . We spent the rest of our available time walking this interesting and well-restored wetland park, finding a good variety of water birds and a few migrant passerines along the trail. We ended the day with 82 species of birds, good enough since we’d spent so much of our time looking successfully for one of our target species.
