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		September 11, 2004    Avids Endure Beautiful Weather by Bill Whan Seventeen hardy Avids gathered well before dawn on 11 September 2004 to brave fair skies, 72° temperatures, and windless conditions along the western Lake Erie shore.  We’d cancelled a planned two-day trip to Conneaut and Presque Isle State Park because scouting had convinced us the birds present weren’t worth the time and expense.  Instead, we made a last-minute substitution of a favorite September itinerary: a search for shorebirds and passerine migrants along Lake Erie shore migrant traps. I like to say we bird in four dimensions: the three conventional dimensions of space, plus that of time. We know about good spots for birds, and while we know something of their schedules, we also tend to rely on memory of times gone by, when such and such a species was discovered and enjoyed by all.  It was memories of earlier encounters with the charming buff-breasted sandpiper on the lawns at Maumee Bay SP that led us that way for our first stop. We needed to get there early, before kids and dogs and gasoline-driven recreation drove the birds away, and we were able to hit the beach at 8:15 AM. We had a very high percentage of veteran Avids on this trip, and in no time we had without prompting split into groups to survey the birds present: the lawns, the beach at the bathing lagoon, the Lakeside beach, the skies overhead. The freshly-mowed lawns harbored not a killdeer, much less a buff-breasted; memory had betrayed us again. There were plenty of killdeers, though, enough to commandeer the lagoon beach, allowing only a handful of other shorebirds to share it. The Lake beach had a big larid roost, with three species of gulls and three of terns, all of them expected.  We went over to the Park’s Trautman Nature Center and walked the smaller loop, finding the woods and openings eerily silent. A yellowthroat called briefly, our first warbler, and we saw a few other species, but the news was the absence of so many. Shotgun blasts in adjoining Mallard Club Marsh WA told us somebody was seeing birds, at least a few teals. We skipped wildlife areas during the day.  Hunting was going on, and the managers had managed the water deep enough to accommodate it, forcing shorebirds elsewhere. And it was too early for the big fall push of waterfowl. Our next stop was Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge, where we knew one impoundment had been lowered to accommodate shorebirds.  This fairly small pool required a trek of about 3 ½ miles, and as it turned out it was a largely uneventful walk out and back, with very little in the way of migrational movement, or even local birds. At the impoundment we seized upon the day’s first interesting gathering of birds, waders and shorebirds, and spent nearly two hours scanning each. The water was up, and species variety down, since our previous visit, but at least we finally had some birds. Hunger summoned us to walk back, then to drive through a fairly birdless Magee Marsh to Crane Creek SP, where we stopped for lunch within earshot of the Bird Trail. While we ate, we saw a mourning dove, and heard a Carolina wren; this list—a complete one--persuaded us to move on.   It was clear the afternoon we had planned for migrant dickie-birds at Sheldon Marsh was not going to be productive, and the possibility of getting back to Columbus before the hordes from the OSU football game clogged the streets was alluring. After we enjoyed four juvenal sanderlings doing on the beach what they do on beaches the world around, we turned south, planning a stop at Killdeer Plains on the way. As we’d figured, the gunners had long vacated Killdeer by the time we arrived, and we had a little marshland on the east end to ourselves. We knew the marsh was populated by rails and bitterns and sedge wrens, but in the heat of late afternoon only an occasional grunt was to be heard from them. The wildflowers were dazzling, though. We had a serenade from a marsh wren, though, and made the most of it. We didn’t want anyone else to know about the rails, so if questioned by guys in pickups with gun racks we planned to say we were city folks come to look for butterflies, a story plausible enough.  We left soon enough to miss the traffic, and our veteran group was experienced enough to know that weather so fine does not always bring birds.  On such a trip in September, trip-lists of over a hundred are fairly routine, but the challenges were too great for us this time.  Our list of 84 species follows: Canada goose Wood duck Mallard Blue-winged teal Northern shoveler Green-winged teal Hooded merganser Ruddy duck Ring-necked pheasant Pied-billed grebe Double-crested cormorant Great blue heron Great egret Snowy egret Turkey vulture Osprey Bald eagle Red-tailed hawk American kestrel Peregrine falcon American golden-plover Semipalmated plover Killdeer Greater yellowlegs Lesser yellowlegs Spotted sandpiper Sanderling Semipalmated sandpiper Western sandpiper Least sandpiper Pectoral sandpiper Stilt sandpiper Short-billed dowitcher Long-billed dowitcher Bonaparte’s gull Ring-billed gull Herring gull Common tern Forster’s tern Caspian tern Rock pigeon Mourning dove Common nighthawk Chimney swift Belted kingfisher Red-bellied woodpecker Downy woodpecker Northern flicker Eastern wood-pewee Eastern phoebe Eastern kingbird Warbling vireo Red-eyed vireo Blue jay American crow N. rough-winged swallow Barn swallow Black-capped chickadee White-breasted nuthatch Carolina wren Marsh wren Swainson’s thrush Gray catbird European starling Cedar waxwing Nashville warbler Yellow warbler Cape may warbler Pine warbler Blackpoll warbler Common yellowthroat Wilson’s warbler Chipping sparrow Song sparrow Northern cardinal Indigo bunting Red-winged blackbird Eastern meadowlark Common grackle Brown-headed cowbird House finch American goldfinch House sparrow Page updated 04/04/05 © Columbus Audubon 2005