Seventeen hardy Avids gathered well before dawn on 11 September 2004 to brave fair skies, 72° temperatures, and windless conditions along the western Lake Erie shore. We’d cancelled a planned two-day trip to Conneaut and Presque Isle State Park because scouting had convinced us the birds present weren’t worth the time and expense. Instead, we made a last-minute substitution of a favorite September itinerary: a search for shorebirds and passerine migrants along Lake Erie shore migrant traps.
I like to say we bird in four dimensions: the three conventional dimensions of space, plus that of time. We know about good spots for birds, and while we know something of their schedules, we also tend to rely on memory of times gone by, when such and such a species was discovered and enjoyed by all. It was memories of earlier encounters with the charming buff-breasted sandpiper on the lawns at Maumee Bay SP that led us that way for our first stop. We needed to get there early, before kids and dogs and gasoline-driven recreation drove the birds away, and we were able to hit the beach at 8:15 AM. We had a very high percentage of veteran Avids on this trip, and in no time we had without prompting split into groups to survey the birds present: the lawns, the beach at the bathing lagoon, the Lakeside beach, the skies overhead.
The freshly-mowed lawns harbored not a killdeer, much less a buff-breasted; memory had betrayed us again. There were plenty of killdeers, though, enough to commandeer the lagoon beach, allowing only a handful of other shorebirds to share it. The Lake beach had a big larid roost, with three species of gulls and three of terns, all of them expected. We went over to the Park’s Trautman Nature Center and walked the smaller loop, finding the woods and openings eerily silent. A yellowthroat called briefly, our first warbler, and we saw a few other species, but the news was the absence of so many. Shotgun blasts in adjoining Mallard Club Marsh WA told us somebody was seeing birds, at least a few teals.
We skipped wildlife areas during the day. Hunting was going on, and the managers had managed the water deep enough to accommodate it, forcing shorebirds elsewhere. And it was too early for the big fall push of waterfowl. Our next stop was Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge, where we knew one impoundment had been lowered to accommodate shorebirds. This fairly small pool required a trek of about 3 ½ miles, and as it turned out it was a largely uneventful walk out and back, with very little in the way of migrational movement, or even local birds. At the impoundment we seized upon the day’s first interesting gathering of birds, waders and shorebirds, and spent nearly two hours scanning each. The water was up, and species variety down, since our previous visit, but at least we finally had some birds.
Hunger summoned us to walk back, then to drive through a fairly birdless Magee Marsh to Crane Creek SP, where we stopped for lunch within earshot of the Bird Trail. While we ate, we saw a mourning dove, and heard a Carolina wren; this list—a complete one–persuaded us to move on.  It was clear the afternoon we had planned for migrant dickie-birds at Sheldon Marsh was not going to be productive, and the possibility of getting back to Columbus before the hordes from the OSU football game clogged the streets was alluring. After we enjoyed four juvenal sanderlings doing on the beach what they do on beaches the world around, we turned south, planning a stop at Killdeer Plains on the way.
As we’d figured, the gunners had long vacated Killdeer by the time we arrived, and we had a little marshland on the east end to ourselves. We knew the marsh was populated by rails and bitterns and sedge wrens, but in the heat of late afternoon only an occasional grunt was to be heard from them. The wildflowers were dazzling, though. We had a serenade from a marsh wren, though, and made the most of it. We didn’t want anyone else to know about the rails, so if questioned by guys in pickups with gun racks we planned to say we were city folks come to look for butterflies, a story plausible enough. We left soon enough to miss the traffic, and our veteran group was experienced enough to know that weather so fine does not always bring birds. On such a trip in September, trip-lists of over a hundred are fairly routine, but the challenges were too great for us this time. Our list of 84 species follows:
Canada goose
Wood duck
Mallard
Blue-winged teal
Northern shoveler
Green-winged teal
Hooded merganser
Ruddy duck
Ring-necked pheasant
Pied-billed grebe
Double-crested cormorant
Great blue heron
Great egret
Snowy egret
Turkey vulture
Osprey
Bald eagle
Red-tailed hawk
American kestrel
Peregrine falcon
American golden-plover
Semipalmated plover
Killdeer
Greater yellowlegs
Lesser yellowlegs
Spotted sandpiper
Sanderling
Semipalmated sandpiper
Western sandpiper
Least sandpiper
Pectoral sandpiper
Stilt sandpiper
Short-billed dowitcher
Long-billed dowitcher
Bonaparte’s gull
Ring-billed gull
Herring gull
Common tern
Forster’s tern
Caspian tern
Rock pigeon
Mourning dove
Common nighthawk
Chimney swift
Belted kingfisher
Red-bellied woodpecker
Downy woodpecker
Northern flicker
Eastern wood-pewee
Eastern phoebe
Eastern kingbird
Warbling vireo
Red-eyed vireo
Blue jay
American crow
N. rough-winged swallow
Barn swallow
Black-capped chickadee
White-breasted nuthatch
Carolina wren
Marsh wren
Swainson’s thrush
Gray catbird
European starling
Cedar waxwing
Nashville warbler
Yellow warbler
Cape may warbler
Pine warbler
Blackpoll warbler
Common yellowthroat
Wilson’s warbler
Chipping sparrow
Song sparrow
Northern cardinal
Indigo bunting
Red-winged blackbird
Eastern meadowlark
Common grackle
Brown-headed cowbird
House finch
American goldfinch
House sparrow