Harlequin duck, snowy owl, white-winged gulls: nice, but they all disappeared from the Toledo area, and from our plans, during a storm shortly before our 4 January 2003 trip. A couple of reported good birds apparently remained in the east, so our hardy band of twelve followed the Lake Erie shore east from the middle, looking for seasonal birds on its unfrozen waters. The skies were cloudy, the temperature just below freezing, and the breeze only brisk enough to nip uncovered skin from time to time.
Birds reported from the previous day had apparently changed their plans, but others were around, and plenty of them. Bay View had sheltered over 7000 gulls Friday; on Saturday maybe 200 were around for us, with some snow buntings as consolation. A stop at Castalia, which looked depopulated for January, added some puddle ducks to the list. We tried the Fish Hatchery, but it was closed, despite all the signs welcoming the public. At Huron, hordes of birds at the harbor mouth lured us ever farther onto the pier, and we spent an hour and a half with gulls and waterfowl, finding gulls (four lesser black-backed, two glaucous, many herrings, some great black-backeds, one lonely Bonaparte’s, and surprisingly few ring-billeds), and most of the winter divers of the region, including 600 lesser scaups and no fewer than 2750 handsome common mergansers. A common loon was a nice January find. One distant, snoozing gull—which resembled an adult lesser black-backed with bright pink legs—kept some staring, then speculating, then finally scampering out the slippery rocks toward the lighthouse for a closer look. A slaty-backed type had been reported not so long before, and this one looked, well, evocative of that species. A closer look and some sincere soul-searching persuaded observers that it was merely an aberrant LBBG; the legs, though decidedly unusually pink, were not the bubble-gum color a slaty-backed shows, and the size and proportions were wrong for the latter species. But it did get us heated up for the long cold walk back to shore.
Lorain was customarily bone-chilling, but swarming with gulls. They seemed to be of the usual four species, however, and our best find was a single long-tailed duck in the basin. We wanted to get to Cleveland before sundown to find a merlin that reportedly had settled into trees at a local cemetery, so we did not linger long at chilly Avon Lake , where we were again offered plenty of gulls, but only in the Four Flavors. The Rocky River Park area was given a quick but thorough reconnaissance, our vehicles simultaneously stopping at three nearby vantage points. Radio communication soon revealed that one location had scoters, so we all converged at Bradstreet’s Landing for one surf and two black scoters, bringing the day’s waterfowl total to 19 species. If we’d stopped at Ottawa , we’d have had 22—and no, I’m not counting the pond-ornament trumpeter swans.
We swapped some passengers to split into two parties, one to try for eared grebe in Cleveland , then to see the lingering rufous hummingbird in Wayne County on the way home, the other to look for the grebe, a reported Iceland gull, and the merlin in town. This time we got the Full Cleveland—a familiar phenomenon in which none of a number of fabulous rarities found along the Lakefront can be relocated the following day. Day?—heck, we ran into a group of elated Amish birders who reported they’d just seen two eared grebes in the E. 55th Street basin minutes earlier but all twelve of us, after squandering half an hour of precious daylight, could find nothing but a single pied-billed. Come to think of it, some of those beards did look phony…
We were astonished to behold a patch of this year’s first blue sky, but leaders wisely counseled newbies that it was only, in the abiding words of Judy Howard, “just a sucker-hole.” Did I mention that the Iceland gull was nowhere to be found? Our two-car party of eight studied a couple thousand gulls for a nose-numbing half an hour without so much as a wishful misidentification. We scooted down to the Cemetery finally, where though armed with explicit directions we found no merlins at all. In fact, the cemetery was dead, the most bird-deprived area we’d visited in quite a while.
Meanwhile, the rump group was successful in finding an adult rufous hummingbird—ah, how quickly we become jaded, as a January review-species hummingbird became the object of a last-minute side-trip by only a few Avids—but so single-minded was their pursuit that they added not a single other species to our list of 49, which remained severely lacking in landlubber birds. So, with apologies to Billie Holliday for the title above:
