I set up my phone to receive tweets from the Biggest Week and dozens came in every day. Half were bird sightings and the other half were promotional tweets extolling the virtues of their various sponsors. It was overwhelming and at a dime a tweet kind of expensive. Naturally, after the event was over the tweets fell off precipitously, but a few birders were still using the system. While we were on the boardwalk, a tweet came in from Greg Miller: there was a KIRTLAND'S WARBLER on the east beach.
Kirtland's Warbler is the holy grail of warblers. It is the rarest warbler in North America. Their population numbers around 5000. 40 years ago they were down to less than 500. They nest int he jack pines of northern Michigan. Until recently no one even knew where they wintered (a small island in the Bahamas). A few pass through Ohio on their way to their nesting grounds. I've heard stories of 10,000 birders staking out a berm where one was sighted. How amazing was it that we were on the east end of the boardwalk when the tweet came through? We were walking distance from the bird! If we could find it.
We hoofed it over to the East Beach area as fast as we could. It was all I could do not to run and leave Shari behind, but really, if I had seen it and she hadn't it wouldn't have been any fun. When we got to then entrance, Greg was there, directing traffic. Had this happened the week before he would probably have needed a bullhorn to guide the thousands of birders who would have converged on the spot, but this week there were only a few dozen people headed toward the bird.
Which we didn't see. The bird flew east from where Greg had seen it and despite 50 sets of eyes, no one could refind. We started walking back and met Greg on the beach.
I reintroduced myself to him, reminding him of the time we spent birding at Barnegat and Shari & I took pictures of him with the two women he was guiding that day--they were in a celebratory mood of course, having seen the bird with Greg. As we were talking, 5 American White Pelicans flew overhead. They're relatively rare in Ohio and certainly rare in multiples in May, so it was a decent consolation prize.
It is a rule of birding that you will not find the bird until you have truly given up on seeing it. And the birding gods know if you're sincere in your hopelessness--you can't fake giving up. As we were talking to Greg he saw many hands pointing to a tree and said, "They've got it again, better get down there." Off we went to around the place we had turned back and there, beneath a small tree, was the Kirtland's Warbler, a female (though the males and females are quite similar, the females are a little grayer on top), being very cooperative, running around the base of the tree, hopping up to a low branch for a moment, than jumping off. We had our lifer. Incredible. I said to Shari we might as well just go home, we're not going to see anything better than this on this trip. We high-fived Greg, thanked him profusely, and left the beach, all aglow. Before we left for the trip, Shari said that maybe we'd see a Kirtland's but I told her not to get her hopes up. It was just a matter of right place, right time.
11 species
Double-crested Cormorant 1
American White Pelican 5
Great Egret 1
Bald Eagle 1
Killdeer 1
Least Flycatcher 1
Eastern Kingbird 1
Tree Swallow X
Barn Swallow X
American Redstart 1
KIRTLAND'S WARBLER 1
Kudos!
ReplyDelete