“Oh, I see that you have binoculars. Are you a bird watcher?”, asked the woman walking her dog down the snowy path in a Gahanna park.
“Yes, but it's been kind of a slow morning today, what with the deep snow and cold”, I replied.
“Well”, she continued with a little tinge of excitement, “My friends who live up the street near the park swear they saw a Bald Eagle right there along the Creek 2 days ago. Isn't that rare? Should they call the ODNR or something?”
Quickly ask yourself, how many times have you run into a non-birder who's first question was about eagles? The driver passing you at Greenlawn; the fishermen you run into at Hoover; the hikers who pass you at Highbanks. More and more, eagles have come to be the Bird to be watched for, as far as the public is concerned. Part of this is their charismatic nature as big, self-assured predators, but part of it is the public perception that they are still rare and threatened. Anytime they're seen, this reasoning goes, we're seeing some vestige of wild Ohio accidentally dropped into urban Columbus. This second perception may be out-of-date, both for Columbus and for eagles.
For such Big Bold Birds, it's funny how quickly they've crept up on us. Eagles have been ubiquitous up around the Western basin of Lake Erie for several decades now, so seeing one up there was taken for granted. Here around Columbus, Eagles were an exotic rarity, even in winter, as recently as 8-10 years ago. Bald Eagles nested regularly at Delaware Reservoir for over a decade. Then 6-7 years ago, Eagles started to become a regular fixture at Hoover Reservoir, probably attracted by the large numbers of cold-stunned shad and the waterfowl that massed to take advantage of them. Then they gradually spread to Alum Lake and the Alum Creek drainage, even building a nest along that creek near Polaris. Unfortunately, that nest was eventually abandoned. Another unsuccessful nesting was along O'Shaughnessy reservoir at Twin Lakes Park, north of Dublin. Finally, in the last 3 years, we started getting reports of them along the Scioto and Olentangy in urban Columbus. The capper was Jim McCormac's discovery of a nest at Anderson Quarry just downstream of Scioto Audubon Park 2 years ago on the Columbus Christmas Bird Count. This year, we expected them on the CBC and weren't disappointed. Four different teams found them, including a team in Gahanna right near where that woman's friend had seen one. I didn't even comment on them in my CBC compilers report, that's how unexceptional I considered the sightings.
Really, though, it has taken an exceptional confluence of events. First the habitat had to be there. Most of our major rivers and streams now have corridors of mature forest, either as suburban parks, MetroParks, or conservation easements spurred on by the Greenways plan. The big reservoirs are also well-forested, with much of their shoreline treed or in parks. They also have lots of fish and wintering waterfowl, complements of careful management. This all makes for good eagle winter habitat. Second, the birds had to change. For the longest time, Eagles and Humans didn't mix well in the midwest. Between pollution, habitat destruction and the occasional shooting (accidental or otherwise), the only eagles that survived here were birds that were very wary of humans. Part of their appeal was this wariness; if you saw an eagle back then, you were very lucky. After so many years of selecting for wary eagles, it's been a bit of a pleasant surprise to see so many less wary, human-tolerant birds reappear once we made ourselves behave better. Of course, the pendulum could swing too far; if the birds start taking people's pet koi or small dogs, they might need to become wary again very quickly!
Where can you go to reliably see Bald Eagles in Columbus? Well, almost any large body of water now hosts 1 or more. Hoover Reservoir still remains the best choice because there are now 5-6 birds spending the winter there. In January, when ice cloaks much of the northern reservoir, especially look around the ice shelf/open water interface in the middle or southerly reaches of the reservoir. The open water patches there often contain the fish or waterfowl that these eagles are interested in; many times you can see their big hulking shapes sitting on the ice near these edges. If not, check the tallest trees for their big silhouettes. Other reliable spots include Alum Lake (particularly off the Hollenback marina or SummerRidge Access areas) and Scioto Audubon & Berliner Parks (especially below the dam if the river above the dam is frozen).
Many of our urban river greenways, however, are also starting to attract eagles. The Gahanna bird is likely the same one that has been reported from along Big Walnut Creek from Hoover dam south through the Little Turtle and the Cherrybottom neighborhoods. 1-2 birds have been quite regular now along the Scioto River in Dublin, from Kiwanis Park north through O'Shaughnessy dam; they can often be seen in the trees within the first half mile below the dam. Another 1-2 birds have been frequenting Blacklick Creek between Pickerington and Groveport. Earlier in the Fall, they were roosting in the dead snags in Cruiser Pond in Cruiser Park in Groveport, but recently they've been seen in a variety of locations around or near the creek, including Pickerington Ponds. Eagles have also been observed along Alum Creek beween the Easton Area and Polaris, perhaps the same birds that tried to nest hereabouts earlier.
In any event, eagles seem here to stay, so you better start polishing up your responses to eagle questions. Really, it's an excellent entry to get people talking and thinking about birds and wildlife. When an eagle settles into an area, it's like a natural stamp of approval for the ongoing habitat preservation and restoration efforts in that area. That's a great thing to highlight, and we shouldn't waste the opportunity or the analogy.
Have you seen an eagle today?
If you're reading this, chances are good that you're sitting indoors at your computer or laptop, in a warm environment that stands in stark contrast to the cold outside. It's not just the cold that makes lateFall-earlyWinter birding challenging; it's the bitter wind that comes with it. This is a time of year (along with March-April) when cold fronts and warm fronts slug it out for supremacy over the midwest. Wild swings in temperature, cloud cover, and wind speed are the result.
How can birds survive this onslaught? By finding ' bad-weather refuges', areas where the wind and temperature are not so fierce. As birders, we need to think like birds if we want to take advantage of these weather systems' ability to concentrate birds in good 'wind-shadows'. We need to seek out these sites, and that's where we'll find large groups of birds and increase our chances of finding unusual or rare birds.
What are the best 'wind-shadows' in Columbus? It depends on what you're searching for. For waterbirds, the key elements are both open water and protection from the wind. Since it's too early for lakes to freeze over, these birds can still congregate on open areas , but with some protection from the west or northwest winds that come with cold fronts. Look for rafts of ducks in the lee of islands (like on the east end of Oxbow Island in Hoover) or steep western shorelines (off the Maxtown ramp at Hoover or north of the Home Rd bridge at O'Shaughnessy or the State 229 bridge at Delaware lake) or wind-blocking causeways (like the Sunbury Rd causeway at Hoover or the Cheshire causeway at Alum Creek Lake). Generally, waterfowl are a lot more tolerant of lousy weather than landbirds, but these spots will keep you out of the teeth of the gale.
What about landbirds? For most of them, food as well as some unfrozen water becomes crucial. Wind protection is even more of an issue for them, since they're smaller amd less well-insulated than waterbirds. The result is that they're much more picky about some of their protected locations. Here's a list of some of the best spots, in no particular order, that I've found for hunting lurking landbirds during those blustery days of late Fall-early Winter.
-
Hoover spillway - the deep gorge below the dam, especially around the athletic field on the west side, can be one of the most productive wind-shadows around. Not only do the steep west slopes here offer great wind protection, but the bottom has both the new and old channels of Big Walnut Creek and a healthy population of fruiting honeysuckle bushes. Recently I stopped there on a frigid, windy December morning and found large flocks of Robins, Starlings, and Cedar Waxwings nestled among these berry-bushes. It's also unusually easy to find woodpeckers, chickadees, and other flock birds around the wood edges here, even on the worst weather days.
-
Kiwanis Park - this is the heart of the Scioto gorge in Dublin, and the boardwalk trail takes you down to river level and out of the wind. Tiny seeps here stay open all winter, so there's always flowing water, even if the river freezes. An added bonus is that the nearby Qaurry Park office complex has several birdfeeders that keep finches and sparrows in the vicinity well fed. This is a great spot for Winter Wrens and winter sparrows, including Song, White-throated, Swamp, and Fox.
-
Berliner Park – this park below Greenlawn dam south of Scioto Audubon MetroPark is well-known as a Spring migrant trap. Less well-known is that it's a good protected winter area for lots of landbirds. You need to take any of the footpaths off the levee-top bikpath to get down to the sheltered river shore. On several occasions, I've had large mixed flocks of landbirds, including lots of Brown Creepers, foraging in the sheltered woods along the river while high winds raged up along the bikepath 30 yards away.
-
Portman Park – this small park along the Blacklick Creek bikepath is situated so that its riparian strip acts as an effective wind-screen. I spent one extremely cold Christmas Bird Count here (cold enough to crack my car's windshield) marveling over a large flock of mixed sparrows feeding along the bikepath in the lee of a bitter cold wind. It's still a great spot to find winter sparrow flocks, although creeping suburbanization has started to encircle it.
-
Cobshell-Indian Ridge Trails, Battelle-Darby MetroPark – The Darby Creeks have a beautiful slot gorge around their confluence, and these trails get right down into it. You can park at either Cedar Ridge or Indian Ridge picnic areas, and catch the trails to the west that lead down close to the creek. Just as with many of the trails mentioned above, these areas close to the creek offer both wind prtection and unfrozen water, so quite a few birds accumulate here in bitter cold weather. The scenery here along the Darby is also great, from the steep side canyons around Cedar Ridge to the towering railroad trestle that spans the creeks just at the entrance to Indian Ridge. You can follow the Terrace Trail and the trail of the Ancients further south, so that you get almost a mile of sheltered creekbottom.
All of these spots offer some weather protection for both you and the birds. I've visited them during some gruesome weather and still had good mornings' birding. The birds can certainly survive it, so chances are that you can as well. Dress warmly!
|
Sometimes the least impressive places have a way of continually surprising me. One such area is the low-lying area along Blacklick Creek just north of Groveport. This is an area peripheral to 3-Creeks Park, east of the main part of the park. It's just east of where Bixby Rd. crosses Hamilton Rd. It includes a portion of the Blacklick Bikepath (managed by the Metroparks) and Cruiser Park (a Groveport park). It would be easily overlooked, except that it continues to produce interesting and unusual birds. The following map shows the parkland in green, and the footpath/biketrails in blue-gray.
 groveport.jpg Cruiser Park is a series of playfields unremarkable except for a gorgeous 5 acre wetland in the middle of it. This wetland is the remnant of an old pothole, and it's filled with old dead snags and young willow heads. Because of all the cover, the pond host lots of waterfowl, even though it sits in the middle of a well-used park. Look for Mallards, Black Ducks, Teal, Wood Ducks, Gadwall, and Bufflehead as long as the water stays un-frozen. The large number of dead snags also make for an unusual habitat. Raptors have often taken to roosting here, and Tree Swallows and a rare pair of Red-headed Woodpeckers have been observed nesting in snag cavities in Summer. The swampy edge also has lots of Song, White-throated, and Swamp Sparrows.
One of the best things about this pond is that it's almost a drive-up birding site. Park in the big lot along Bixby Rd and walk over to the edge of the pond. Its north and west edges offer some decent viewpoints, especially in the winter; you can walk the bikepath along its western edge to get multiple viewpoints into the several open areas of the wetland. Look for raptors roosing out on the snags or up on the power line pylons that run past the north end of the pond. On a recent morning, I drove up and was rewarded with 2 roosting Bald Eagles (1 adult and 1 immature). Best time appears to be early morning or late evening; during the middle of the day, many of the waterbirds and raptors commute out to nearby wetlands and fields.
The pond isn't the only attraction here. Look north rom the parking area along Bixby Rd and you'll see a bikepath snaking through the field and into the woods. This is a spur trail that links Cruiser Park to the Blacklick Bikeway, a trail that runs along Blacklick Creek. To the west, the path winds over the the confluence area of 3-Creeks, but it's the eastern run that concerns us here. This is a (currently) 1-mile dead-end spur that snakes along the creek bottom, through meadows and wood-edge, to a dead end at Rt. 33. Because the Blacklick Creek corridor arrives here from the northeast, it funnels Fall migrants and winter wanderers down towards the lower part of the path (and Cruiser Park).
From Sept through December the path almost always has something interesting, and I've had fallouts of warblers, sparrows , and blackbirds at different times here. The same November morning that I spied the eagles at Cruiser Pond, I also biked the path. The lower meadows had the expected flocks of Song & White-throated Sparrows as well as a single Towhee. As the path bent to the north, the wood edges gave me chances to find plenty of woodpeckers, chickadees, titmice, and other forest birds. Brown Creepers are regular here from late Fall through Spring, and I saw 2 and heard another 2 this morning. One of the best places to see many of these birds is around a feeder maintained by the MetroParks in one of the wooded pathes along the trail. A Cooper's Hawk flashed past early in the trip, but I didn't see the resident Barred owl despite having lots of Blue Jays to help me out. Near the dead-end, I peered to the east into a private pond, but only had mallards today. This pond has had a variety of ducks, herons, and egrets at other times. I retraced my route back to the Cruiser Park lot. A large flock of Canada Geese had landed on the playfields, and the sky was threatening rain. My morning had already been made, by these unassuming parklands.
One of the joys of Columbus is that the city spread so quickly and without much industrialization, that you can find pockets of natural habitats cheek-by-jowl with heavily-developed areas. For instance, the west side of Columbus, with its densely-packed old neighborhoods, is hardly the location one might expect to have a good natural area, but Sullivant Trace has defied these long odds. Wrapped like a shawl around the base of the hill of the Hilltop neighborhood, this narrow greenbelt stretches around the eastern and northern faces of this neighborhood, stretching from Glenwood Park on W.Broad street north and west all the way to Holton Park (and into the tiny hamlet of Valley View). Most of it is traversed by a bikepath that starts in Rhodes Park and ends in Holton Park.
 sullivtr.jpg
I visited Sullivant Trace on a recent sunny November day looking for late migrants. Because it is the only greenspace in the vicinity, it often accumulates all sorts of interesting landbirds. I've found that the best place to park is the huge ODOT lot just west of the massive office builings along W.Broad St.; its lot is much better patrolled than the lonely lots in Wolfe Park. You can pick up the bikepath just off the north end of the lot, and I wandered west along it, past some meadows and down past an old flood control impoundment. This is sparrow city, and I quickly found Chipping, Field, Song Swamp, and White-throated Sparrows here. The impoundment has a small marsh that is one of the most reliable spots in the city for Swamp Sparrows. As I walked further down the path, it slipped into a tiny riparian ravine where woodpeckers, chickadees, and nuthatches were foraging. A Phoebe flycatching over the creek was a good late record. Further west the path broke out into parkland leading up to the Holton Recreation Center; the honeysuckle along the creek here was swarming with Robins and Waxwings. I looped around the Holton park, where the park and neighboring yards held more flock birds. A trio of Turkey Vultures soared overhead, spiraling up to continue their southward migration. As I walked back eastward, I hiked up onto the flood impundment berm, going around the northern, non-bikepath side of the flood impoundment, checking the shrubby edge of the Dry Run creek corridor for interesting birds. I've had late White-eyed Vireos and Orange-crowned Warblers here in the past, but today could only rustle up a few kinglets and a flock of White-throated Sparrows.
 sullivtrace.jpg
As I headed back east, I passed the ODOT lot and kept going. The path bends past a huge grove of planted Gingko trees which had a few Chipping Sparrows today. Then it descended down through the scrubby hillside to the fields of Wolfe Park. You can walk the path straight out to Broad St., but I veered left to walk along the face of the shrubby hillside looking for Yellow-rumped Warblers (hit) and Towhees (miss). 1-2 Horned Larks were out in the playfields of Wolfe Park, but I wouldn't expect them on the weekend when these fields are heavily-used. I back tracked along the hillside to the south, eventually reaching W.Broad, where I turned west, hiking up the sidewalk to the ODOT lot. I didn't have time to cross the street to Glenwood Park, but have often found good birds there, especially earlier in migration. It has perhaps the densest woodlands in the area, so can attract forest birds that are harder to get elsewhere along the trail, like Thrushes and woodland Warblers.
This site has an interesting history. It is one of the last places in west Columbus that still looks vaguely like it did when the area was still being settled. The trace stretches along part of the old Lucas Sullivant farmstead, which stretched from Franklinton (down around Central Ave) all the way up to the Hilltop. His was one of the original families to settle the area, and their name graces a lot of things in Columbus. In fact, there is a huge glacial boulder just west of the flood impoundment that figures in an ancient photo of the Sullivant farm. Columbus Parks used to have a copy of this picture along the trail, but it was continually defaced by vandals. This brings a last caveat. This area has a certain charm all its own, but don't let it blind you to some reality. The neighborhoods next to ODOT and Glenwood Park are both struggling, and I've run across homeless men and unsettling characters at both Glenwood and Holton Parks, so be alert. Generally, you won't be bothered, and a little vigilance is a small price to pay for a good urban nature walk with some colorful history as a bonus.
|
