Category: In the Field

I did a little birding and naturalizing in this municipal park, a square of suburban woods and swamp. A few takeways:

Wild Geranium (Geranium maculatum) does very well in this sandy soil that was once a lake bed. Great drifts of these flowers line both sides of the trail.

Another species that’s quite common, but one that’s unseen in the mid-Atlantic, is Eastern Fox Squirrel (Sciurus niger). One day I’ll get a tack-sharp image of this critter.

That big tree with the blocky bark? It’s not a Chestnut Oak, but good old Eastern Cottonwood (Populus deltoides), dominant in habitats like the lake shore. And often growing straight up, just to confuse visitors from the east and west.

I also spotted a Question Mark butterfly (Polygonia interrogationis) and a couple species of mystery mushrooms.

My final van trip was led by Greg Miller and Drew Weber: we visited two sites in Erie County, with a side trip to a field across the road from the J. H. Routh Packing Co. to check out two Cattle Egrets (Bubulcus ibis) doing what they should be: hanging out with cows.

Conditions at Pipe Creek were very drippy, swinging from light drizzle to a steady rain, but we nevertheless had A+ looks at a Lincoln’s Sparrow (Melospiza lincolnii) (named neither for Abraham nor Frederick Charles, but for Audubon’s travel companion Thomas).

The weather cleared by the time we arrived at Sheldon Marsh, and the birding was quite fine here. I picked up my eighth lifer for the trip, Philadelphia Vireo (Vireo philadelphicus).

All told, I had great numbers for the Biggest Week in American Birding festival. My cumulative species count came to 113, give or take the odd Rock Pigeon, and my warbler count was 21. I’ll need to come back for Connecticut and Mourning.

Spring is a few weeks behind us in D.C.: Spring Beauty is still in full bloom here in northwest Ohio. Ethan Kistler led the walk-drive through this park (which apparently came about because property values crashed when the nearby airport expanded). No matter how the park came to be, it was good for two lifers (Blue-winged Warbler [Vermivora cyanoptera] and Henslow’s Sparrow [Ammodramus henslowii)]) and a second-look bird (Grasshopper Sparrow [A. savannarum]). As well, the park was filled with Baltimore Orioles (Icterus galbula) and Red-headed Woodpeckers (Melanerpes erythrocephalus).

In this board-flat province, the Girdham sand dunes are some of the most rugged topography I’ve seen all week.

We returned to the same wetland complex in Sandusky County that we visited Monday, this time circumambulating the Decoy Marsh restoration project with Ray Stewart and Drew Weber. Drew coached me through my lifer Willow Flycatcher (Empidonax traillii). We got a look at a pair of Blue-winged Teal (Anas discors)—it’s easy to focus on the crescent on the face as a field mark, but as I was showing a California birder the Peterson guide for this bird, we both realized (and observed) that the bird does indeed show a sky-blue wing. What a nice walk: full sun on the forest edge rimming the wetland, and enough twists and turns to the path that we could adjust our views of shorebirds and ducks to compensate for the sun.

We heard Trumpeter Swans (Cygnus buccinator) calling in the distance, and on the drive back to the meeting point, we found a nesting pair on a unnamed pond for an A+ look for the trip.

Man oh man, some of the robins in this part of the country have a brick-red breast; very confusing. And the Song Sparrows sing a different dialect.

On my own in the afternoon, I walked the Adam Grimm Prairie at Ottawa NWR. I did not detect the target bird for this stop (Henslow’s Sparrow [Ammodramus henslowii], which has been reported recently here), but the stop was worth it. After the crush of the Magee Marsh boardwalk, for almost two hours, I had. The. Grassland. To. Myself. At the end of my quiet walk, after working through a different sparrow ID, I was treated to the sight and sound of at least two Eastern Meadowlarks (Sturnella magna).

I spent about an hour on the Magee Marsh boardwalk (I took a long time working out a Palm Warbler [Setophaga palmarum] that for once was not bobbing its tail because it was busy preening, not foraging), and then I joined one of the informal walks that are part of the Biggest Week conference registration. Sarah Winnicki co-led a group down the Crane Creek Estuary Trail. I got another, better look and listen of the Warbling Vireos (Vireo gilvus) that are fairly regular here—an A- look, but good enough for a twitch. Even better was the look at a Gray-cheeked Thrush (Catharus minimus) skulking about along one of the dikes.

The winds picked up over the course of the morning—much more blustery than yesterday, but no crazy rainstorms in the afternoon.

No bird, plant, or habitat pictures, but this myxomycete at the entrance to the trail is quite nice.

The bridge that carries I-280 over the Maumee in Toledo is rather grand.

Tom Kashmer and Katie Andersen led a canoe trip down the sleepy Green Creek to its mouth at Muddy Creek Bay. This body in turn flows with the Sandusky River into Sandusky Bay. At the start, we found it tricky to manage the boats (I haven’t been in a canoe since I was a kid at summer camp) and see any birds. But soon we were picking up warblers and tanagers and other songbirds that we hadn’t seen yesterday.

The target bird for this trip was Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), and it was a slam dunk. We found a good dozen-plus birds, both adults and immatures, in the lowest reaches of Green Creek and over Muddy Creek Bay. But the big pleasant surprise was a quick flyover of three Trumpeter Swans (Cygnus buccinator). I’ve probably seen this bird before, but I’ve never been confident of an ID. For that matter, I’d like to have had another look at the three we saw today.

I love these old marker posts. This one along U.S. 20 is dated 1842 on its top, so it’s from the time before Lower Sandusky was renamed Fremont. I interpret it as signing 26 miles to Lower Sandusky (to the southeast) and [2]5 miles to Perrysburg (to the northwest). Most of the paint has weathered away. The only problem with my reading is that Lower Sandusky/Fremont is much closer than 26 miles at this point.

Very birdy.

That’s perhaps the only way to describe Magee Marsh in spring migration. I picked up two lifers, Bay-breasted Warbler (Dendroica castanea) and Tennesssee Warbler (Oreothlypis peregrina)—perhaps the only two that I will find this trip.

Many eyes and ears make for easy spotting, but the bouncy boardwalk and throngs of birders make birding here a little like trying to get a seat on a Red Line train at 8:30 in the morning.

The lakefront, on the other side of the huge parking lot from the boardwalk, is much more my style.

I watched Tree Swallows (Tachycineta bicolor) picking insects off the ground to carry back to the nest. I saw multiple Yellow Warblers (D. petechia): if the sight of a bright Yellow Warbler doesn’t give you a little jolt of joy, you don’t really like birds. An iridescent Common Grackle (Quiscalus quiscula) foraged in the wet leaf litter (dishwasher downpours of rain yesterday), tossing leaves aside and cocking its gimlet-eyed head like a cop looking for your dope stash.

In the afternoon, I went to a slide-show workshop by Kenn Kaufman on flycatcher ID. The talk was held at the visitor center of Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge, and who should be there in the lobby to greet me but Puddles the Blue Goose!

I got the nest box monitoring team to stand in one place long enough for Rob to take a group photo.

From my most recent report of the nest box team’s activities:

Lots of activity in the past two weeks! We have nests in 8 of the 16 boxes we are monitoring. We have often observed mixed clutches of Wood Duck and Hooded Merganser, but [we] found something new in box #60: two birds flushed from the box, one of each species. The box has a combined clutch of 14 eggs.

We expect box #67 to be hatched out by May. Box #6 did not show any change between the 29th and the 5th, so it’s possible that this nest has been abandoned. Continuing my run of dropping hardware into the wetland, box #7 needs a new quick link closure: I have some spares and I will take care of this next time.

I have new GPS coordinates for all the boxes, and I will be distributing that info.

We have several pictures of duck and merg eggs side by side for comparison, and I will get something distributed shortly.

Tree Swallows say thank you to box #84 for being such nice spot to perch up on. A Brown-headed Cowbird could be heard in the parking lot on the 29th. An Osprey was fishing in the main pond on the 5th.

* * *

That’s all for us for April. Our May work day will be the first Sunday, 3 May.

The team faced down the sleety weather this morning to start the rounds of checking nest boxes.

Following such a cold February, the wetland was substantially iced over, with only the main channel of Barnyard Run free-flowing. Which meant two things: first, we got some closer looks at wintering ducks than we otherwise might have.

Second, the effort of walking up to the boxes was much easier. Most of the boxes were surrounded by firm ice (see guest photo by Kat). This also meant that we weren’t working over our heads—always a challenge for the more diminutive members of the team. It was only at the edges of open water where the ice would suddenly break through, threatening to tip the unwary monitor into the cold, cold water and mud.

The end result is that we made our tour in an hour and half No dawdling to look for birds (though we did see a Bald Eagle and a couple of Pileated Woodpeckers), no fussing with the hardware. Back to the cars before the next round of frozen stuff falls from the sky.

What we did not see, somewhat surprisingly, were any merganser eggs. Usually they get a least one box started ahead of us, somewhere in the last days of February.

This windthrown maple is having a bad winter.