Seems the Weather Bureau might be skittish about being sued or something these days, as it issues forecasts so dire as to make you afraid to open the front door. More often than not the wind’s not so hard, the snow so deep, or the temperature so cold as they foretell. Too many rainstorms are accompanied by warnings not to drive through deep water, and nowadays tornado sirens are just a call to the neighbors to head outside, rather than dive into the cellar with buckets on our heads. And so it was on this trip, as premonitions of a grim day turned into a sunny one, temperatures soared into the forties, and the wind never knocked us over once.
Eight of us gathered well before dawn in hopes of duplicating some of the intriguing sightings we’d heard about along the Lake Erie shore. One spot had boasted three little gulls and a black-legged kittiwake just the day before, and purple sandpipers were about, and could be found if the ice had melted off the HBSP breakwall. The mantle of leadership lay on the unworthy shoulders of yours truly, and I got us started all awry by ratchet-jawing so intently with Steve that we didn’t realize we’d missed the turn onto Rte 4 until sixty miles had passed, compelling us to reach Huron by way of Tiffin and Fremont. At least I abandoned a plan to tell everyone I’d decided to throw Pickerel Creek into the mix at the last moment, and confessed all when we arrived.
Huron harbor was a disappointment, with a couple thousand ring-bills on the bar and not much else. Lorain was wall-to-wall gulls, conservatively thirty thousand of them, spangling the Lake out a mile or more, jamming the river and its banks for half a mile, covering the marina docks and the breakwalls, all while several thousand wheeled in the air. Every hapless duck entering the harbor was met by volleys of ill-aimed shotgun fire from local Nimrods. Jason spotted a purple sandpiper taking the sun in a little ice cavern between two hunters’ blinds; a long way out, it was nevertheless identifiable. A very jaeger-like bird was spotted zigzagging over by the lighthouse, but it ducked behind the wall, never to emerge. Gulls were inspected from several vantage points, but only the standard four species were found.
One carload had started back at 1 pm, so we skipped Avon Lake and took the freeway to E. 72nd St in Cleveland, where we met some of the distinguished local birders, who reported having failed to find the kittiwake or the little gulls. We looked over the slim pickings as we commiserated with them. They did tell us they’d found a king eider at Mentor Lagoons earlier that morning, and when our companions headed south we headed that way, where after a mile’s walk through the woods we easily relocated the mixed flock of ~40 scoters, and within it our prize, a young male king eider. We took the occasion to practice on scoter ID, as all three species were present in basic plumage, then passed the bird on to the next group of birders and headed back.
We gave E. 72nd another shot, and as the sun sank and yellowed we found a very dark lesser black-backed gull in the multitudes, but none of the smaller rarities we’d hoped for. Our list for the day, limited as it was by spotting from speeding cars or standing on the lakefront looking towards Canada, was not a long one, but it has its points:
Â
Canada Goose
American Black Duck
Mallard
Northern pintail
Redhead
Greater scaup
King eider
Surf scoter
White-winger scoter
Black scoter
Hooded merganser
Red-breasted merganser
Ruddy duck
Pied-billed grebe
Double-crested cormorant
Great blue heron
Bald eagle
Cooper’s hawk
Red-shouldered hawk
Red-tailed hawk
Rough-legged hawk
American kestrel
American coot
Purple sandpiper
Bonaparte’s gull
Ring-billed gull
Herring gull
Lesser black-backed gull
Great black-backed gull
Rock pigeon
Mourning dove
Hairy woodpecker
Blue jay
American crow
American robin
European starling
American tree sparrow
Song sparrow
Swamp sparrow
Northern cardinal
Red-winged blackbird
Common grackle
Brown-headed cowbird
House sparrow