July is dicey. The breeding season is winding down, and only the first stirrings of migration — gatherings of swallows, passages of gulls and some shorebirds for example — have begun. The really neat stuff—those rare post-breeding wanderers (five white ibises had been reported this month alone in Ohio, equaling the total of accepted records in all of history!), the hurricane-driven waifs from tropic climes (Ohio’s first sooty tern had come earlier in the month!), the birds that surprise by moving so early like the long-tailed jaeger (a state life bird for nearly all of us!) — is of course really rare. But hope springs eternal, though we almost always schedule our July outing as late as possible in the month to hedge our bets.
And so we did this time, penciling in 30 July. Thirteen showed up on a day of peerless weather for a trip to intercept some of the earlier shorebirds in the wetlands of NW Ohio. Hints and rumors and portents always loom large in our planning, and this time we had a store of lore, recent and some a bit shopworn, to go by. Some new Wetland Reserve Program land in Hardin County had produced a flush of shorebirds, so we made that our first stop. Along the way we thought to check out last year’s king rail nest site at Killdeer, as it was along the way, and driving through a wildlife area, compromised as Killdeer is by invasive plants and inappropriate activities, seemed like a good idea.
At dawn’s early light, instead of king rails we found a recently-incised slice across the road pavement harboring a new drain — can’t have too much wet in your wetland, you know? —- and no rails at all. Back in May, rail footprints had been found in the mud nearby. Here we noticed the first of 10-15 singing sedge wrens we were to hear on roads through Killdeer; some think this species heads right to Canada to nest in May, then has another fling at our latitude on the way back south in July — it sure sounded like it. Killdeer still had some really nice stands of prairie dock in flower, but also gobs of invasive white teasel, and endless acres of useless reed canary grass. We made a last stop there for a vesper sparrow that serenaded us at close range.
The shorebird spot we aimed for had dried out, and while it looked promising for the future we were able to dig out only a couple of semipalmated shorebirds among the remaining throngs of killdeers. We finished the trek to the Lake at Ottawa, where we took an unaccustomedly leisurely walk among its many acres, our time mostly taken up by two long stops at vantage points where we scoured the limited habitat for the shorebirds present: they were few, and they were a long way off. Here too the advances made by invasive plants —- Phragmites, purple loosestrife, flowering rush —- was a bit depressing. They were all looking pretty happy, the northern part of the state having gotten a good dose of rain this season. After an al fresco lunch on the Crane Creek beach (no jaegers), a carload had to peel off to get back to Columbus by 4 pm, but they promised to stop at Hoover Reservoir and call us about what they’d found.
More high water made our next stop, Pickerel Creek WA, a colorful spectacle, but few birds found it appealing, and we sped up to Medusa Marsh, where other than a few terns and yellowlegs the stars were 141 great and 14 snowy egrets. On a cool day, a stop at the ice-cream factory was nevertheless welcome along our way to Pipe Creek WA. Here we found that new locations of the “no trespassing” signs surrounding the common tern colony pretty much prevented a convenient circuit around the marsh, which, like all the others, was deep in water and a riot of color —- too often loosestrife. We got a call from our rump group at Hoover, who said that the habitat at the upper end of the reservoir looked attractive to shorebirds, but that only a few had been beguiled. It was getting late, and this pretty much persuaded us that we were not missing anything -— indeed, I think however short it was we had the longest list of shorebird species of any group in the state that day —- so we set off for home with a day’s list of 86 species, and here they are:
Canada goose
Mute swan
Wood duck
American black duck
Mallard
Blue-winged teal
Green-winged teal
Ring-necked pheasant
Pied-billed grebe
Great blue heron
Great egret
Snowy egret
Green heron
Black-crowned night-heron
Turkey vulture
Bald eagle
Cooper’s hawk
Red-tailed hawk
American kestrel
Killdeer
Greater yellowlegs
Lesser yellowlegs
Solitary sandpiper
Spotted sandpiper
Semipalmated sandpiper
Least sandpiper
Pectoral sandpiper
Stilt sandpiper
Wilson’s phalarope
Ring-billed gull
Herring gull
Caspian tern
Common tern
Forster’s tern
Rock dove
Mourning dove
Yellow-billed cuckoo
Chimney swift
Ruby-throated hummingbird
Belted kingfisher
Red-headed woodpecker
Red-bellied woodpecker
Downy woodpecker
Easter wood-pewee
Willow flycatcher
Eastern phoebe
Eastern kingbird
Warbling vireo
Red-eyed vireo
Blue jay
American crow
Horned lark
Purple martin
Tree swallow
N. rough-winged swallow
Bank swallow
Barn swallow
Black-capped chickadee
Carolina wren
House wren
Sedge wren
Marsh wren
Eastern bluebird
American robin
Gray catbird
Northern mockingbird
Brown thrasher
European starling
Yellow warbler
Common yellowthroat
Eastern towhee
Chipping sparrow
Field sparrow
Vesper sparrow
Savannah sparrow
Grasshopper sparrow
Song sparrow
Swamp sparrow
Northern cardinal
Indigo bunting
Dickcissel
Red-winged blackbird
Eastern meadowlark
Common grackle
American goldfinch
House sparrow