Avids Travel in Time along the Lake
by Bill Whan

Birding along Lake Erie, especially this time of year, is dominated by the weather. A north wind will aid migrant perching birds and hawks, and may blow interesting gulls and jaegers within sight of shore. A south wind may keep a wave of migrants in place near the shore, and perhaps clear lakeside mudflats that attract shorebirds. Clear skies can make it easier to see raptors on the move, and dirty weather can ground small migrants in predictably good birding spots. Trips such as ours, the date chosen by applications of runes and Tarot cards in a time-honored, mystery-shrouded ritual each April in a heady atmosphere of hot chiles and strong drink, cannot see ahead of time what the weather will be. Actually, for 7 October, zillions of dollars of fancy equipment and an army of weather forecasters missed the boat.

Nine of us set forth in the predawn gloom for Cleveland, where we had an appointment with Sean Zadar, the current guru of Gordon Park, who had been hoarding a cache of Nelson’s sparrows in his Lakeside demesne and promised to share them with us. As dawn brightened a clear sky, we could see on the horizon ahead, scores of miles away, a black bank of clouds like a ledge of wet slate, ragged-edged and threatening, and we knew the weather was somewhat different in Cleveland. By the time we reached Parma, rain was battering the cars, and it was dark as the inside of your hat. Avid as we are, of course, we never considered turning back, but some of us worried anxiously about our rain gear.

Through the gloom we spotted a glow on the horizon, not far from where Jacobs Field must have been, a chink of mottled salmon and gold, troubled clouds lit from the east. We knew it had nothing to do with the Indians, who’d fallen from the pennant race not long before. The chink grew and grew, and by the time we’d reached Dead Man’s Curve, covered the whole sky ahead, flocks of hurrying gray cloud and pure Arctic blue ruled the sky.  Soon thereafter at Gordon Park Sean and Ted Gilliland taught us a lot about the dredge-spoil impoundment and its birdlife, and though we missed the Nelson’s sparrows we saw plenty of birds in the wind-tossed pigweed and Polygonum and willows. The plants were a treat, actually, with lots of escaped tomatoes and cucumbers included in the usual rank weeds. Sleet pattered across the landscape from time to time, shafts of sunlight strode across the distance between bouts of darkness, and the birds were skittish.

By the time we left, the sky was a war of clouds with a westering wind, and we had rare migrant seabirds in mind as we stopped at a series of overlooks of Lake Erie. We found only a few strings of cormorants and small loafing congregations of ring-billed and herring gulls along the way. The Lorain impoundment is undergoing a transformation too complicated to explain here, and its future as interesting habitat for birds remains uncertain. We finally gave up the jaeger-hunting and went after the commoner migrants of the season at Sheldon Marsh State Nature Preserve west of Huron, where sunny skies persuaded a lot of warblers and their neighbors to feed in the open.

We had noticed as we passed over the Huron river on the freeway that the winds, newly shifted to the south, had blown out the mudflats beneath the bridge, and this gave us hope that we might find shorebirds and other species on mudflats off the Cedar Point chaussee adjacent to Sheldon Marsh. Our last stop was a walk out the chaussee, under a newly glowering sky and spitting rain. The area was wall-to-wall fresh mudflat, and the shorebirds were starting to accumulate. A couple of drenched eagles sulked on the far side, and we had nine species of shorebirds, including an excellent count of 82 sanderlings, all under a glorious rainbow that appeared after the squall passed and the temperatures rose into the 50s. All in all we had 86 bird species for the day, in a good variety of habitats and a bewildering variety of weather conditions. It is unusual to be able to experience three or four different kinds of weather—temperature, precipitation, wind direction and velocity, cloudiness, etc., in a single day, and by the end we were as weary as if we’d spent several days in our journey. A list of the species seen follows.