Five members of JAS drove down to Monroe County for the annual summer shorebird trip. Each year we pull a DNR permit to allow car access on the dikes of this facility. Our usual shorebird experts were unable to lead the group this year. But since birders live by Blanche DuBois’s maxim that you can “always rely on the kindness of strangers,” we had lots of help from fellow travelers along the dike.
After the usual activity of eagle, cormorant, gulls, & terns observed where the Huron River dumps into Lake Erie, we went into the series of dikes of this complex. It was looking very dry this year, but then one of the canals in the Schlager unit looked promising. There were several shorebird species there but a bit far for us to identify all of them. Among the group were two large sandpipers that could have been godwits, but we were unable to confirm due to distance.
(Steve Jerant)
Looping around to the west we got much better looks at the birds. This was one of the two best spots of the day. Those two large sandpipers were indeed the Hudsonian Godwits that we had seen earlier. There were also Wilson’s & Red-necked Phalarope, Baird’s, Least and Semipalmated Sandpipers. We got a tip about a very birdy area in Cell 3 in the ‘banana’.
While driving the middle causeway, we saw one of the birds on our watchlist, a Whimbrel. It was doing its best Killdeer impression just walking down the road not bothered by a few thousand pounds of steel coming up on its back.
After lunch we walked into the Cell 3 pond. I’ve never walked on dried mudflat soil like this. Each clay block was free floating and moved a bit when you tread on them. There was an active mudflat with 75 shorebirds and ducks. Here we saw Ruddy Turnstone, Long-billed Dowitcher, Ruddy Turnstone, Buff-breasted Sandpiper, and Pectoral Sandpiper.
Cell 3 dried mudflat underfoot and pond in the distance. (Steve Jerant)
We had been seeing large numbers of American White Pelicans throughput the day. On our way back out we got a good angle to see three groups sitting in one view. I counted about 200.
We observed 60 species including 18 shorebirds, 10 waterfowl, and 10 other wetland species.
eBird Checklist available at https://ebird.org/checklist/S270455040
