• Bruce Glick: Gone Birding

The challenges of spring birding

• Bruce Glick: Gone Birding
• March 13, 2020
• 1298

It seems almost every month there are plenty of interesting things happening in the birding world.

Helen and I got back to Goshen on March 2 after two months in Southeastern Arizona. We took a day to unpack, wash clothes and relax a bit after the three-day drive. However, the seven-county Meadowlark Spring Birding Challenge started on March 1, and our team was already two days behind.

This spring challenge is a lot of fun. Teams of four adults and up to four young birders under 16 compete to find as many species as possible in the local seven-county Meadowlark Area for the months of March, April and May. Two of the four birders on our team are in Florida for two weeks, which means my friend Gary and I needed to get started.

I should mention there are actually two contests going on because our local Elkhart County folks are running the same challenge, except for just our county. That means we need to decide whether to bird locally or visit some of the hot spots in the surrounding counties.

We spent the first day close to home including an hour at the local landfill. The day was windy but clear, and thousands of gulls were either resting on the side of the landfill or trying to find something as the trucks dumped nearby. We found one adult lesser black-backed gull quite easily, but the white-winged gulls were harder to pick out among the masses of ring-billed and herring gulls.

Eventually we located a glaucous gull, which obliged us by flying in our direction, giving us great looks at close range. I found a distant gull that I think was an Iceland gull, this one what we used to call Thayer’s gull, but the bird was distant, and it was hard to get a good look.

Our second day was spent checking out Potato Creek State Park, where we found a very early osprey back on territory. All three mergansers were on the lake, but we failed to find the northern shrike that another team of birders had seen the day before.

As it got later in the afternoon, we drove to an area with lots of grassland, as well as cropland. A short rain shower ended, and the sun came out. We were entertained by 3,000 sandhill cranes and 1,200 greater white-fronted geese, as well as two short-eared owls. This was by far the largest number of greater white-fronted geese we have seen in our local counties.

A third trip took us to the southern edge of our seven counties. There we walked several miles through an ACRES land-trust park. Our goal was to find a Carolina chickadee. We were in luck — one curious Carolina stayed in a tree over our heads for five minutes. This one appeared to be 100 percent Carolina, both in appearance and song. Not far to the north, there are lots of hybrid chickadees, as is the case along much of U.S. Route 30 in Indiana and Ohio.

Bobolink area birders in Ohio have been excited about the female painted bunting that has been seen by many. Thanks to the landowners who have welcomed birders, as so often has been the case over the years.

Good birding!

Bruce Glick can be emailed at bglick2@gmail.com.