Sometimes it’s fun just to sit back and enjoy the beauty, the surprise, the learning, the companionship of birding, and let others enjoy—they must be, aren’t they?—its frustrations, anomalies, vanished birds, inscrutable directions and lost destinations, highway detours and flooded pathways, unidentifiable birds and tiny blood-sucking arthropods. Such are the advantages of having scheduled carpooled trips with leaders. We leaders, expensively trained and lavishly compensated by Columbus Audubon as we are, cannot guarantee stellar results every time, even though we are instructed humbly to take the blame. If you like being led, this was the trip for you. Maybe the perfect weather was insufficient challenge to their avidity, or most of our regulars were indulging in traditional Buckeye football-Saturday breakfasts of beer and pancakes at Papa Joe’s, but this time after an anxious wait only six of us set forth from Worthington Mall. Three of us were designated leaders.

Each July and August I am allowed to influence our plans to go after shorebirds, taking the heat for herding innocent birders to toast for hours unending in the glaring sun, striving to make out blurry brown blobs in the heat waves out on the reeking mudflats, wetting our fingers with insect repellent to turn the pages of dogeared field guides and cursing fate. By September I am usually outvoted, as other Canadian neighbours, the warblers and vireos and flycatchers—or dicky-birds as shorebirders dismissively call them—visit, and take precedence in the minds of the Central Committee. Thus our compromise itinerary, an early stop at Sheldon’s Marsh State Nature Preserve, a peek into Medusa Marsh, a walk at Ottawa (while not quite the traditional Death March, at least a prolonged confinement), and if possible popping into Maumee Bay SP.

And, extravagantly provided as we were with leadership, this was exactly what we did. We wandered about at Sheldon until the sun’s heat caught trees along the NASA road, stirred up insects, and brought darting hordes of warblers, inducing more than a few to indulge in weak songs, all punctuated by the snapping of mandibles. A gang of waxwings converged on a big cottonwood, knocking visible clouds of insects free as they landed. We had five cuckoos without trying, fourteen warbler species, so many warblers it was usually hopeless to help others to relocate a find in the throngs that swept as if on an invisible wind through the trees on their way south. The old Cedar Point chaussee had a white pelican, a thousand mixed gulls and terns, and a few shorebirds, but was hard to study with so many carloads of amusement park enthusiasts hogging the roadway.

Medusa Marsh was easier. Sure, scornful locals honked like ducks as they roared by a few feet behind as we peered across the water, but our lives did not seem in danger. Two more pelicans. An avocet was nice. Terns and egrets and a surprising variety of mud-colored eclipsed ducks. And lotsa shorebirds, I’ll admit: more than a dozen species, including side-by-side phalaropes in two flavors, a multitude of stilt sandpipers conveniently feeding cheek to cheek with look-alikes…but I have to save space for the trip list.

We stopped for lunch at Crane Creek SP beach, leaving a gang of Dayton birders slack-jawed when we mentioned we had 92 species already; fittingly, they delivered a tribute of cookies to our table. Little did we know we were to find only 11 more species the rest of the day. We scrutinized a dried-up lagoon and found—yes—more shorebirds, then stalked the boardwalk to pick up more warblers—black-throated blue, prothonotary—and—bingo, another shorebird, a woodcock. Ottawa next door featured a long sunny walk around a distant impoundment, with more shorebirds, a Baird’s, mixed flocks of black-bellieds and golden-plovers. Maumee Bay had no buff-breasteds, though five had been there the afternoon previous, but we found sanderlings and black terns and enjoyed enormous dreads of terns and two weddings on the beach, distantly-related vertebrates enjoying a perfect day at the beach together. Our list of 103 follows: