Point Pelee 5/9--Black Tern, Red-headed Woodpecker, Warbling Vireo, Blue-winged Warbler, Blackburnian Warbler, Black-throated Green Warbler, Rose-breasted Grosbeak, Orchard Oriole, Baltimore Oriole

Point Pelee is a migrant trap. They're not kidding about the point. It is triangle of land jutting south into Lake Erie, the first land birds find after crossing the vastness of Lake Erie and they plop down in it gratefully. Birders flock to migrant traps which makes it hard on both the birds and other birders. Then the birders complain that there are no birds around. When we got out of the shuttle bus that took us from the Visitor Center down to the point and I saw 50 birders marching down a path, I wasn't surprised that the birding was "slow." The birds don't want to be around hordes of people; neither do I. We hung back, took the road less traveled and were rewarded almost immediately with a Red-headed Woodpecker, a species hard to find in NJ, but pretty common around there.

Shari scoping out the Point

Eventually, we did make it down to the point, finding many Bonaparte's Gulls, Lesser Scaup, Black-bellied Plovers, and such. It was, in a way, like a return to winter. But the real action, we found was along the marsh and in the woods.

It was on the boardwalk that winds through the marsh that we saw a couple of Black Terns having some kind of interaction, positive or negative impossible to say. We've seen Black Terns before, but never in full, dramatic, breeding plumage, and never so well.

Photo: Shari Zirlin

Up to then, our birding there had be okay, but I would have to characterize it also as "slow." Then we took a walk in the woods. And somebody turned on the spigot and the birds began to flow. Suddenly, there were warblers, vireos, grosbeaks and orioles all around us and all the other birders on the paths. It wasn't too bad, but a little more silence probably would have persuaded even more birds to appear.

Barn Swallow on nest
Photo: Shari Zirlin

For our day at Point Pelee, we had 41 species, with 9 of them FOY:

Canada Goose  5
Lesser Scaup  20
Red-breasted Merganser  1
Double-crested Cormorant  5
Red-tailed Hawk  1
Black-bellied Plover  20
Dunlin  1
Bonaparte's Gull  100
Ring-billed Gull  X
Herring Gull  X
Great Black-backed Gull  1
Black Tern  2
Common Tern  10
Mourning Dove  3
Red-headed Woodpecker  1
Red-bellied Woodpecker  2
Downy Woodpecker  2
Warbling Vireo  1
Blue Jay  100
Tree Swallow  2
Barn Swallow  20
Carolina Wren  1    Heard
Blue-gray Gnatcatcher  1
Ruby-crowned Kinglet  1
Hermit Thrush  1
American Robin  4
Ovenbird  1
Blue-winged Warbler  1
Common Yellowthroat  3
Blackburnian Warbler  1
Yellow Warbler  20
Black-throated Green Warbler  2
Chipping Sparrow  2
White-throated Sparrow  1
White-crowned Sparrow  1
Rose-breasted Grosbeak  3
Red-winged Blackbird  100
Common Grackle  100
Brown-headed Cowbird  1
Orchard Oriole  1
Baltimore Oriole  5