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April 28, 2007: Avids Meet Migrants Midway by Bill Whan Avids grow restless before the birds do, getting moody, even cranky among all the crocuses of March. Looking south rather than north, they await the brilliant darting hordes they know, from long experience or listening to Floridians' chat, are on their way. This spring's prolonged freeze in early April nipped a lot of buds and killed many insects, making for a drearier more makeshift season, but our eyes were never downcast. The first great wave of migrant songbirds consists largely of our own nesters, who begin their nesting season in the south. Impatient but confident, therefore, we went south, where Brad, a son of Scioto County, promised us the first good glimpses of migration in and around the sprawling Shawnee State Forest. Car-pooled and burdened with food and water-as even for the birds nutrition was hard to come by now in those hills and hollows-twenty-two, six car-loads, of us converged on the state marina on the Ohio River. Our first spring trip always brings a good turnout, as even those, who like Baptists darken the church door only for Easter, can't pass up a trip such as this. A rather dreary weather forecast was quickly forgotten as blue skies spilled warmth, getting birds in song, and we lingered even in the parking lots and putting greens and dockyards of the marina, delighting in orioles and tanagers and warblers. The Forest, hit hard by ice storms a few years back, was slowly coming back from the fresh insult of killing frosts several weeks before. Vast tracts of oaks were nearly naked, showing only new small struggling budlets, and swaths of brown dead vegetation disfigured the hillsides. Brightest were the quick-to-recover grasses and some wildflowers, and of course brilliant birds defending territories joined them in promising spring however long delayed. We birded the grottos and valleys, the ridge-tops, the conifers, the burned-over areas, even the tumbledown residences and fishing-holes and power-line rights of way. We checked out agricultural fields and the bottoms of the River. As usual, nearly all the birds present were of species that regularly breed in the area: the few others-Nashville, golden-winged, and Blackburnian warblers, for example, and most of the shorebirds-were headed farther north. We located most songbirds by song, then joined forces to get good looks at each species, lingering for participants who were seeing them for the first time---for the spring migration trip always brings along extra Avids-in-the-making. Nearly all the species present obliged us, although we satisfied ourselves with the haunting echoes of the waterthrush and the innumerable ovenbirds teaching from leafy cover on the ground. We reconciled our lists from Friday-for a scouting contingent had spent the previous day covering the ground-and this day, and part of the group continued back to Columbus with stops at some different habitats on the way back. Our intention was not to return from an April trip with fewer than a hundred species on the list, an indignity which only terrible weather has inflicted on us in the past. Our rump carload stopped at Moore's Run, the bottoms in West Portsmouth, the Jasper bridge, and the Pickaway Plains with the time remaining. We added species not present in the Forest, shorebirds and grassland species and birds easier to see in the open sky. We ended with a two-day list of 108 species, 103 of those seen on Saturday. Here is the list, with species seen only on Friday marked with as asterisk:
Page updated 4/30/07 © Columbus Audubon 2007 |
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