MAGEE MARSH: From Maumee to Magee

I should have been a weatherman. Not because of what I know, but because of what I don’t know. Is there any other job that allows you to be less accurate? To be fair it absolutely pour down this morning, and we took advantage of that by hunkering down, with coffee and an assortment of breakfast items at Tim Horton’s in Oregon – the town, not the state! By mid morning, that was the last of what was suppose to be an 80% chance of an all day rain event!

Returning back towards the birding spots centered around Ottawa NWR, we enjoyed a walk along the boardwalk at Maumee Bay Nature Center (above). It is extremely heartening to have a Canada Warbler be the first bird you see! Wilson’s, at least for those of us from the east, is also high on the list. The Nashville was the first of what would be over a dozen during the course of the day. A pair of Scarlet Tanagers showed well in the wet woodland oaks, and a roosting Common Nighthawk was a nice find on a horizontal limb near the top of a bare tree.

On the ‘beach’ area surrounding the large pond, nine Common Terns (above) were roosting, sheltered from the wind, and a lone Caspian Tern flew over. Shorebirds foraging along the edge of the water included Dunlin, Least and Spotted Sandpiper.

Amongst the arable fields west of Ottawa NWR we found a couple of female Yellow-headed Blackbirds, heard Field Sparrow and had Ring-necked Pheasant and Eastern Bluebirds.

How can anyone go wrong by visiting Magee Marsh boardwalk for the umpteenth time? Did the Blackburnian Warbler (above) ever put on a show for us? At times it was feet away from fifty birders and photographers!

This was not the only gathering of birders. There were many, each having a unique show of their own. Word spreads quickly as people enter and leave the boardwalk. There was the Golden-winged Warbler, a female, just beyond the stairs to the elevated platform (above).  The bathing Palm. A Yellow-billed Cuckoo by marker 9 and an Orange-crowned Warbler by the first right hand turn. The Prothonotary’s just beyond that. This did not account for thrushes, Black-throated Greens, Northern Parula, or the multitude of Nashville or “butter-butts” along the way. All this activity was within a couple hundred yards of the entrance and kept us busy for almost two hours.

We ended the evening with a dusk vigil for American Woodcock (above) behind the Black Swamp Bird Observatory. A group of a dozen of us waited patiently for a woodcock to land on the winding path ahead of us. We were not disappointed when a single bird alighted at the edge of a puddle barely 40 feet from us, and proceeded to waddle away from us to the edge of the next puddle. It was from here that we could see and hear it “peenting” it the hopes of attracting a mate.