Juggling time, space, and our self-imposed rules is doubly difficult on a short winter day with dirty weather. Still, a gang of thirteen Avids assembled in the chill and dark, many hoping to intersect the well-publicized advance of hungry crossbills across the state, and it was to these cruciferous megamandibular cone-crunchers that we dedicated our day’s efforts.
Many of the white-winged and red crossbills reported had been flyovers on the way somewhere else, but a few locations had hosted longer stays. The most promising of these were to be our major destinations. Because the first was too close to reach by daylight, we started before dawn at Killdeer Plains, where we managed to see a couple of short-eared owls before deer-hunters took over. They, and the owls, were the only raptors we encountered there, oddly enough.
Oak Hill Cemetery, just southeast of Upper Sandusky, had been a crossbill hotspot, and we stopped here next. This old necropolis occupies a high spot in the otherwise flat Wyandot County prairie plain. There are some eighteenth-century dates on its memorials, graced by some weathered romantic sculptures, an unusual number of obelisks, inscrutable inscriptions, and funerary icons whose meaning is mostly obscure these days. Like many old graveyards, it is decorated with venerable plantings of conifers, and here among the hemlocks and spruces we sought our quarry.
This hotspot belied the name. On such an exposed site the wind was brutal, chilling well below the 19 degrees air temperature, but we gave it nearly two hours of searching. Flocks of crossbills here had numbered up to forty, but all we saw were a few juncos, nuthatches, woodpeckers, and crows. A pipit put in a brief appearance, buffeted by wind, as did a bald eagle. It was going to be harder than we’d thought.
Acting on phoned-in advice, we stopped at the Upper Sandusky reservoir, where huge numbers of migrant waterfowl, nearly all mallards and Canada geese, covered much of the unfrozen water. A young eagle delighted in flushing them stubbornly again and again, and later sparred with a harrier, who easily out-maneuvered it. We easily enough refound a diminutive cackling goose among the larger hordes.
One choice was to head northeast, where there were a couple of chancy spots for crossbills, and lots of interesting gull and waterfowl venues, or northwest, where several cemeteries had been reported to host crossbills. Because we’d be doing a lot more birding in the northeast next month, we decided on Toledo. Some of us recalled the last big crossbill incursion, when Woodlawn Cemetery there had been a good spot to find both species.
A word on cemeteries. Among the living, we birders spend more time there than most people. Larger cemeteries are always open to the public. They usually have mature plantings. They tend to be quiet, verdant islands in urban or agricultural landscapes that often attract birds. Respectful walking and peering into the trees is well tolerated there, and in winter especially we are usually the only ones about. I for one find their atmosphere inspires thoughts about history, the cycles of life and death, and human customs. On this day, meditation on the vanity of human wishes was to prove especially appropriate.
The snow began on our journey north. A slightly moth-eaten shred of info led us to stop at the Findlay reservoirs, where we saw only a few common waterfowl in the lee of a dike, huddling beneath the shrieking wind. On the way back to the freeway, we saw a Cooper’s hawk quartering a field like a harrier, looking for some warm blood in the snow and bean-stubble.
Woodlawn was gloomy and memorious as always, shrouded and muted in fresh snow. The dense tree cover kept the wind under control, and it was easy to determine there were very few birds calling. We recalled the easiest way to find crossbills here had been to look for fragments of cones pattering to the ground as birds fed, but no soap. We carefully followed the steps taken by our informants, then examined pretty much all the conifers in this expansive site, with nothing to show for it.
We visited some nearby spots that had hosted crossbills recently, to no avail. Eventually the time of day persuaded us to skip the other addresses, and return homeward, stopping at Oak Hill again to give it another chance. Others had reported crossbills there since we’d left, we found. A call informed us that two California gulls were being seen in Cleveland, but too little of the day remained for that. Halfway back to the cemetery an enormous traffic-jam, caused by ice on the freeway, halted some of us long enough to make the Oak Hill visit impossible; those who escaped the jam went, but were double-crossed. So we’ll have to wait for next month to cross this one off our lists. Forty other species crossing out field of view in the rather narrow scope of our investigations included the following:
Canada goose
Cackling goose
American black duck
Mallard
Northern pintail
Hooded merganser
Ruddy duck
Bald eagle
Northern harrier
Cooper’s hawk
Red-tailed hawk
American kestrel
Ring-necked pheasant (road-kill)
Ring-billed gull
Greater black-backed gull
Rock pigeon
Mourning dove
Short-eared owl
Owl sp. (roadside silhouette)
Belted kingfisher
Red-bellied woodpecker
Hairy woodpecker
Blue jay
American crow
Horned lark
Black-capped chickadee
Tufted titmouse
Red-breasted nuthatch
White-breasted nuthatch
American robin
European starling
American pipit
American tree sparrow
Song sparrow
White-throated sparrow
Dark-eyed junco
Northern cardinal
American goldfinch
House sparrow