Last-minute cold feet among normally fearless leaders led us to try to warm them in the murky waters of democracy. This led to the first—and perhaps the last—vote in Avids history, in which the Ravens routed the Shorebirds 7 ½ to ½ . Duly warned about lengthy drives and uncertain results, eleven participants showed up on the appointed day with no one to blame but themselves.
Ravens had been photographed on a nest in Jefferson County this spring, and rejoiced, we were told, in four or five chicks. I and two other Avids had found two ravens in the area three years ago. Still, only a single report had emerged since the nesting, and that was of a single bird seen not very close to the home range. The weather was good, though. Others felt confident of my abilities to find the spot, as I’d been there before. In a rural gas station we improbably found a display of Ohio wines from Raven’s Glen winery in Muskingum County, and Doreene picked up a bottle just for luck.
I’d gotten lost about a dozen times the last time I’d been out in Jefferson Co, so I availed myself this time of high-tech maps off the Web. Most showed a maze of small township roads that stopped abruptly at the margins of the former strip-mining area, but with some ways through, so I brought a sheaf of printouts to navigate us through. When we got there, new resources produced the same old results: dead ends, roads petering out into rutted culs-de-sac, equally misleading advice from friendly locals. I found myself saying at every turn—”I’ve been here before, and let’s try something different.” Fortunately at least some of the advice we got from residents advanced us enough to break through into civilization on the north side eventually, though we arrived about an hour and a half later than estimated. The hot spot consists of a paved road a mile and three-quarters long that runs through a weird forest grown up over an area ravaged by mining. Like very other road in the area, it dead-ends, in this case at an extensive picnic area that boasts but one picnic table. It is remote; during our two hours there we saw only one car and one motorcycle passing by.
Three ‘vistas’ are features along the road, parking areas with adjacent cleared areas from which one can scan an impressive amount of airspace, and it was here we placed our hopes. We had fun walking along ticking off forest birds—two black-billed cuckoos carrying food were a highlight—and butterflies—Dave Horn assembled what he reckoned might be the county’s only lepidopteral list, even finding a Compton’s tortoiseshell, unexpected at this latitude.
By lunchtime we were bereft of ravens, and we considered looking for roadkills, freshly-mowed fields, landfills, etc. We made one last stop at the largest vista, and saw some big black birds about ¾ mile out, nearly as large as nearby turkey vultures. They stuck around, even perching in several spots, long enough for us to get out the scopes and verify they were ravens. Eager for better looks, we cruised some roads across the valley, and actually lucked upon them in a grassy lawn; not everyone got looks, as they warily hid as soon as they saw us, but the ravens were ours.
We wisely took a more expeditious route home, during which yours truly suggested a short side-trip to an airport for some upland sandpipers. Inexplicably, everyone agreed, and I led us up a “short-cut” road that grew wetter and wetter until it was completely swamped. Drivers practiced their newfound skills in turning around in narrow quarters, gamely following my lead into another cul-de-sac where construction closed a promising road through a prairie-like setting near Cadiz. Third time was the charm, as we found the airport, and the sandpipers. So yes, score was Sandpipers 2 (killdeer and upland) and Ravens only 1 after all, and we scooted home from there.
Our trip list is not a long one, and as we were often broken up into search parties I may have missed a few species. Still, I bet very few Ohio birders have seen common ravens and upland sandpipers on the same day during the past hundred years. I counted 73 species, a number that reflects our narrow search, and here’s a list:
Canada goose
Mallard
Great blue heron
Cooper’s hawk
Broad-winged hawk
Red-tailed hawk
American kestrel
Killdeer
Upland sandpiper
Ring-billed gull
Rock dove
Mourning dove
Black-billed cuckoo
Chimney swift
Ruby-throated hummingbird
Belted kingfisher
Red-bellied woodpecker
Downy woodpecker
Hairy woodpecker
Northern flicker
Eastern wood-pewee
Acadian flycatcher
Eastern phoebe
Great crested flycatcher
Eastern kingbird
White-eyed vireo
Yellow-throated vireo
Warbling vireo
Red-eyed vireo
Blue jay
American crow
Common raven
Horned lark
Tree swallow
Rough-winged swallow
Barn swallow
Carolina chickadee
Tufted titmouse
White-breasted nuthatch
Carolina wren
House wren
Blue-gray gnatcatcher
Eastern bluebird
Wood thrush
American robin
Gray catbird
Northern mockingbird
Brown thrasher
European starling
Cedar waxwing
Yellow warbler
American redstart
Kentucky warbler
Common yellowthroat
Hooded warbler
Scarlet tanager
Eastern towhee
Chipping sparrow
Field sparrow
Vesper sparrow
Savannah sparrow
Grasshopper sparrow
Song sparrow
Northern cardinal
Indigo bunting
Bobolink
Red-winged blackbird
Eastern meadowlark
Common grackle
Baltimore oriole
House finch
American goldfinch
House sparrow
Butterfly List
Silver-spotted Skipper
Tiger Swallowtail
Great Spangled Fritillary
Monarch
Tawny-edge Skipper
Question Mark
Cabbage White
Least Skipper
Compton Tortoiseshell
Banded Hairstreak
Hackberry Emperor
Comma
Summer Azure
Red Admiral
Clouded Sulphur
Eastern Tailed Blue
Pearl Crescent
Black Swallowtail
All except the Black Swallowtail were on the Fernwood State Forest Road leading to the Little Round Top Picnic area.
Compton Tortoiseshell and Hackberry Emperor were unrecorded for Jefferson County until yesterday. The Emperor record is trivial, to be expected. The Tortoiseshell is a really good find in Ohio, maybe to butterfliers almost as good as a Raven is to birders. Dave Horn, our resident butterfly expert, knows of fewer than a score of records from counties not bordering Lake Erie. It’s a northern species, in the same genus as the more familiar Mourning Cloak, and overwinters as an adult in hollow trees, barns, sugar shacks, outhouses and other “structures,” whether natural or manmade.