Il pleure dans mon couer comme il pleut sur la ville… —-Verlaine
It is said the Inuit have a hundred words for snow. This is a suspiciously round number, and I suspect the real figure is more like forty-six. Enough, you’d think, especially when you consider that our vocabulary, which dwarfs theirs, gets by with so few words for rain.
And so it is that words fail me in doing justice to the Avid Birders trip of 11 Nov, a trip originally planned for the 18th, but altered as football fever spiked in town. The last-minute change of schedule, along with a gloomy weather forecast, augured a light turnout, and that’s what we got when seven of us gathered just as the first raindrops, chilled by a stay at eight thousand feet, splattered on the shoulders of seven hardy Avids at our predawn rendezvous.
In the background was a productive trip in October, with good looks for all at Ohio’s most elusive sparrows-Nelson’s and Le Conte’s (who the heck were these guys, anyway?)-up in Amish country. Our mood was mixed, though, with shock and sadness at the sudden death earlier that week of one of our number: Becky Hatfield, who for years had infused our group with eagerness and enthusiasm. Becky, who never let up, never complained, and never missed a chance to go birding. It was her spirit that served as inspiration this day and will in trips to come.
We had word that waterfowl had finally showed up, most interestingly good numbers of the scarcer ones like oldsquaws and scoters. It seemed to be a good migration for loons and grebes, as well, and the passage of large numbers of Bonaparte’s gulls led to hopes for the rarer ones that sometimes accompany them. No gannets had been seen, but a surprising number of jaeger sightings had poured in, seemingly almost daily, and it was at these dashing pirates that we directed our efforts, confident that good spots for jaegers were almost by definition spots with lots of the smaller gulls, and probably with waterfowl. Purple sandpipers were in, too. These are all water birds, and we hoped the rain was a good omen.
A long initial drive brought us to Perry Park, a little spot on a bluff overlooking the Lake east of Painesville. Here we joined a busload of damp Amish birders, who’d apparently been standing there for some time, peering through spray-misted spotting scopes at birds far off on the water. Really far off. Someone called out “jaeger,” and excitement rippled through the crowd, then quickly dissipated as only a few were able to discern briefly a dark darting form, utterly unidentifiable as to species, among the gulls a third of a mile off in the murky distance. The wind had shifted north, a circumstance that might have brought birds closer to shore, but instead served only to fog over objective lenses, making seeing anything at all problematic. A steady drizzle began, propelled by fitful bird-free gusts from Canada, and we welcomed a little time spent with the car heaters as we moved on.
We drove a back road near Fairport Harbor, looking for a Ross’s goose reported there for several days. We met Dan Sanders and some other birders just as they were being chased off an illegal parking area, and while we stood among the puddles Dan told us that two hours of searching had not turned up the goose. He promised to call us if it showed up, and we felt free to go into town to look around the harbor. Mew Gull Marina, as birders call it, turned out to be pretty much devoid of birdlife, and a peek ahead at the harbor and river mouth didn’t look good for birds, either, a fact quickly confirmed when we drove over that way. We huddled in the rain-shadow of a block wall along the river mouth, and it was here the weather briefly got the better of us. It didn’t take long to survey the small numbers of birds in the harbor, and people began to satisfy themselves with the smaller vistas available from cover, and to make fussy moves to protect their optics from steadying rain.
We squelched back to the cars, where the inside of the windows soon misted over with the humid exhalations of our clothing as we continued west. At Eastlake Power Plant, at last we had birds. The wind had whipped the Lake up pretty well, and gulls and mergansers bobbed on all sides, with dainty Bonaparte’s-thousands of them-circling and stabbing at fish in long wheeling flocks. We stood for as long as we could in the wind, but a steadier downpour at length drove us to shelter in the cars while we kept watch through the windshield wipers. Surely this gathering would attract hungry jaegers that must be around. Surely among so many birds something unusual must lurk. Surely…surely it would rain still more heavily, and the winds would drive waves to crash over the breakwall in huge sprays of chocolate-colored roiled lake water, making it still harder to see anything.
The battery in one vehicle failed, drained by the heater and the windshield wipers. A call to AAA got us an operator in Calcutta, who insisted we supply her with the name of a crossing street, refusing to accept “Lake Erie” in its place. The place where we’d earlier bought donuts lent us a jumper cable, and we got on the road, though we couldn’t go to a remote place-especially one without a crossing street-and then turn off the one car’s engine, lest we get stuck again. Off Bradstreet Landing, in recent days a reliable spot for scoters and the occasional jaeger in the previous few days, was nothing but tossing four-foot waves, the horizon and any birds lost to sight. At least that’s what the two of us still willing to leave the cars found and reported.
In Lorain, we found our way onto the old taconite pier and wound among flocks of gulls and pools of muddy water out to the end, with a spectacular view of thousands of gulls floating on the waves or breasting the wind. It was still raining of course, and we made the best of it, peering through rivulets of water on the windows, the vehicles rocking in the gale, at the same old three gull species. Nothing unusual was spotted.
A stop at Wellington Reservoir on the way home added growing darkness to the wind and rain. There were hundreds of ducks there, but after scrutiny through the windshields we passed on the chance to step outside with scopes to make sure we’d tallied all the species among the dark blobs on the rain-spattered surface of the reservoir. For the day, our list of 31 was small, spectacularly so, in part because we stuck pretty much to a single habitat, in part because of ugly weather, and in part just because of ugly luck. But we kept our powder dry, and will be out next month.
Canada goose*
Canada Goose
Mallard
Redhead
Ring-necked duck
Black scoter
Bufflehead
Red-breasted merganser
Ruddy duck
Red-throated loon
Common loon
Pied-billed grebe
Horned grebe
Double-crested cormorant
Turkey vulture
Red-tailed hawk
American coot
Killdeer
Bonaparte’s gull
Ring-billed gull
Herring gull
Great black-backed gull
Rock pigeon
Mourning dove
Blue jay
American crow
European starling
Song sparrow
Snow bunting
American goldfinch
House sparrow