This trip, attended by fifteen of us, began at an unaccustomedly late hour—6:30 am—because we could not ask the curator of the Ohio State University Museum of Biological Diversity’s bird collection to get up as early as we do on a weekend. The birds we planned to see are spending eternity there, and their schedule didn’t matter.
The Museum preserves bird specimens—mostly study skins, but also wet specimens, skeletal remains, and eggs and nests—numbering ~30 thousand. In partnership with the Ohio Historical Society, it is the museum of record for the state, caring for the very rarest and most significant specimens. This enormous repository of biological treasures preserves vital information about the ornithological record, the status and distribution of birds, variations in plumage, their evolutionary relationships, genetics and DNA characteristics, etc. We spent two and a half hours there sampling this wealth of information.
Curator John Condit introduced us to the collection, whereupon we explored it in a necessarily shallow way by looking at some of its prizes, passing around specimens of Bachman’s warbler, Carolina parakeet, passenger pigeon, ivory-billed woodpecker, Eskimo curlew, and choice ones like the collection’s oldest specimen, a turnstone found on the deck of a ship 820 miles off the Irish coast in 1818, or an olive-sided flycatcher collected in New York in the 1890s by Teddy Roosevelt.
We looked next at series of specimens that helped to illustrate the characteristics visible in the field to separate long-billed and short-billed dowitchers, longspurs, western and semipalmated sandpipers, sapsuckers, and immature accipiters. After that, various members of our group were turned loose to study specimens in which they were interested: a number of those who’d recently returned from a trip to Ecuador enjoyed seeing specimens they’d seen in the field, for example. All had such a grand time examining the remains of long-dead birds that it was difficult to pull free to continue with our planned search for live ones, but by about 9:30 we moved on, with thanks to Condit and the Museum for an extraordinary experience.
A diminished number first looked around the nearby OSU campus for birds. Led by Jeff Grabmeier, we stood behind the Drake Union to observe ten black-crowned night-herons (adults and immatures in about equal numbers) across the Olentangy River; these birds have a year-long presence along a stretch of the river here, but no one has yet documented breeding. We walked through the omnipresent construction areas toward the medical campus, and saw a kestrel, a bald eagle, a red-tailed hawk, but no peregrine falcon. We later learned that at least three peregrine falcons have been retrieved as corpses on the OSU campus in recent years, with no record of nesting.
Reports from around the state had been disappointing, but we decided to explore an area that hadn’t been described in birding reports: Big Island Wildlife Area in Marion County, just south of Killdeer Plains. The time was right for migrant waterfowl, lingering winterers like shrikes, owls, sparrows, etc. When we got there things were pretty dull, with small numbers of perhaps a dozen waterfowl species (not even many mallards!), no shrikes, or passerines to speak of. Winds of 20+ from the northwest made birding uncomfortable and unproductive as well. We ran into some other groups of birders who’d had equally bad luck. The owl grove had a lot of fresh pellets, but no owls. After repeated stints standing in wintry blasts with nothing much to see, some of us wished we’d stayed in the nice warm Museum to look up close at birds, even if they were dead as doornails. We retreated quite early for Avid Birders, but less out of cowardice than the lack of birds, who apparently had the good sense to spend the day elsewhere. Our list for the day consisted of 61 species: I have taken the liberty of including long-dead Ohio birds we all observed in the trays at the Museum (these are marked with an asterisk)…
Great blue heron
Black-crowned night-heron
Turkey vulture
Canada goose
* Cackling goose
Gadwall
American wigeon
American black duck
Mallard
Redhead
Ring-necked duck
Lesser scaup
Common goldeneye
Hooded merganser
Common merganser
Red-breasted merganser
Ruddy duck
Bald eagle
Northern harrier
* Sharp-shinned hawk
Cooper’s hawk
* Northern goshawk
Red-tailed hawk
American kestrel
Killdeer
* Eskimo curlew
* Semipalmated sandpiper
* Western sandpiper
* Short-billed dowitcher
* Long-billed dowitcher
Ring-billed gull
Rock pigeon
* Passenger pigeon
* Carolina parakeet
* Great gray owl
Red-headed woodpecker
Red-bellied woodpecker
Downy woodpecker
Northern flicker
* Ivory-billed woodpecker
* Loggerhead shrike
* Northern shrike
Blue jay
American crow
Horned lark
Carolina chickadee
Tufted titmouse
White-breasted nuthatch
Carolina wren
Eastern bluebird
American robin
European starling
* Swainson’s warbler
American tree sparrow
Song sparrow
Northern cardinal
Eastern meadowlark
Common grackle
Brown-headed cowbird
American goldfinch
House sparrow