Sometimes it’s fun just to sit back and enjoy the beauty, the surprise, the learning, the companionship of birding, and let others enjoy—they must be, aren’t they?—its frustrations, anomalies, vanished birds, inscrutable directions and lost destinations, highway detours and flooded pathways, unidentifiable birds and tiny blood-sucking arthropods. Such are the advantages of having scheduled carpooled trips with leaders. We leaders, expensively trained and lavishly compensated by Columbus Audubon as we are, cannot guarantee stellar results every time, even though we are instructed humbly to take the blame. If you like being led, this was the trip for you. Maybe the perfect weather was insufficient challenge to their avidity, or most of our regulars were indulging in traditional Buckeye football-Saturday breakfasts of beer and pancakes at Papa Joe’s, but this time after an anxious wait only six of us set forth from Worthington Mall. Three of us were designated leaders.
Each July and August I am allowed to influence our plans to go after shorebirds, taking the heat for herding innocent birders to toast for hours unending in the glaring sun, striving to make out blurry brown blobs in the heat waves out on the reeking mudflats, wetting our fingers with insect repellent to turn the pages of dogeared field guides and cursing fate. By September I am usually outvoted, as other Canadian neighbours, the warblers and vireos and flycatchers—or dicky-birds as shorebirders dismissively call them—visit, and take precedence in the minds of the Central Committee. Thus our compromise itinerary, an early stop at Sheldon’s Marsh State Nature Preserve, a peek into Medusa Marsh, a walk at Ottawa (while not quite the traditional Death March, at least a prolonged confinement), and if possible popping into Maumee Bay SP.
And, extravagantly provided as we were with leadership, this was exactly what we did. We wandered about at Sheldon until the sun’s heat caught trees along the NASA road, stirred up insects, and brought darting hordes of warblers, inducing more than a few to indulge in weak songs, all punctuated by the snapping of mandibles. A gang of waxwings converged on a big cottonwood, knocking visible clouds of insects free as they landed. We had five cuckoos without trying, fourteen warbler species, so many warblers it was usually hopeless to help others to relocate a find in the throngs that swept as if on an invisible wind through the trees on their way south. The old Cedar Point chaussee had a white pelican, a thousand mixed gulls and terns, and a few shorebirds, but was hard to study with so many carloads of amusement park enthusiasts hogging the roadway.
Medusa Marsh was easier. Sure, scornful locals honked like ducks as they roared by a few feet behind as we peered across the water, but our lives did not seem in danger. Two more pelicans. An avocet was nice. Terns and egrets and a surprising variety of mud-colored eclipsed ducks. And lotsa shorebirds, I’ll admit: more than a dozen species, including side-by-side phalaropes in two flavors, a multitude of stilt sandpipers conveniently feeding cheek to cheek with look-alikes…but I have to save space for the trip list.
We stopped for lunch at Crane Creek SP beach, leaving a gang of Dayton birders slack-jawed when we mentioned we had 92 species already; fittingly, they delivered a tribute of cookies to our table. Little did we know we were to find only 11 more species the rest of the day. We scrutinized a dried-up lagoon and found—yes—more shorebirds, then stalked the boardwalk to pick up more warblers—black-throated blue, prothonotary—and—bingo, another shorebird, a woodcock. Ottawa next door featured a long sunny walk around a distant impoundment, with more shorebirds, a Baird’s, mixed flocks of black-bellieds and golden-plovers. Maumee Bay had no buff-breasteds, though five had been there the afternoon previous, but we found sanderlings and black terns and enjoyed enormous dreads of terns and two weddings on the beach, distantly-related vertebrates enjoying a perfect day at the beach together. Our list of 103 follows:
Pied-billed grebe
American white pelican
Double-crested cormorant
Great blue heron
Great egret
Snowy egret
Green heron
Turkey vulture
Canada goose
Mute swan
Wood duck
Mallard
Blue-winged teal
Northern shoveler
Green-winged teal
Hooded merganser
Osprey
Bald eagle
Northern harrier
Red-tailed hawk
Sora
Black-bellied plover
American golden-plover
Semipalmated plover
Killdeer
American avocet
Greater yellowlegs
Lesser yellowlegs
Solitary sandpiper
Sanderling
Semipalmated sandpiper
Least sandpiper
Baird’s sandpiper
Pectoral sandpiper
Stilt sandpiper
Short-billed dowitcher
Wilson’s snipe
American woodcock
Wilson’s phalarope
Red-necked phalarope
Bonaparte’s gull
Ring-billed gull
Herring gull
Caspian tern
Common tern
Forster’s tern
Black tern
Rock dove
Mourning dove
Yellow-billed cuckoo
Chimney swift
Ruby-throated hummingbird
Red-bellied woodpecker
Downy woodpecker
Northern flicker
Eastern wood-pewee
Willow flycatcher
Eastern phoebe
Great crested flycatcher
Warbling vireo
Philadelphia vireo
Red-eyed vireo
Blue jay
American crow
Tree swallow
Northern rough-winged swallow
Bank swallow
Barn swallow
Black-capped chickadee
Tufted titmouse
White-breasted nuthatch
Carolina wren
Ruby-crowned kinglet
Eastern bluebird
Veery
Gray-cheeked thrush
American robin
Gray catbird
European starling
Cedar waxwing
Nashville warbler
Yellow warbler
Chestnut-sided warbler
Magnolia warbler
Cape May warbler
Black-throated blue warbler
Yellow-rumped warbler
Black-throated green warbler
Blackburnian warbler
Palm warbler
Blackpoll warbler
American redstart
Prothonotary warbler
Common yellowthroat
Wilson’s warbler
Canada warbler
Summer tanager
Song sparrow
Northern cardinal
Red-winged blackbird
Common grackle
American goldfinch
House sparrow