Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, and home

Wisconsin, short and sweet

I made just one stop just north of the Wisconsin border at Governor Dodge State Park. I got there really early since Wisconsin has a really punitive policy for out-of-state visitors, where you have to buy first a yearly permit, for something like $12, and then pay admission, and then camping if you want to do that. Camping ends up being around $20 the first night. But if you drive in and out before the toll booth opens, well... I needed six species in WI to make a hundred, and ended up with eleven new ones, mostly at one very productive roadside stop, almost random, where a little drainage crossed the road with scattered small trees in a sort of riparian belt through a meadow. Some migrant warblers, and misc flycatchers and vireos. Ended with a Cooper's Hawk. 29 species at one stop, 11 new. Perfect. Then I drove out of Wisconsin, with just a stop at the Cabella's in Prairie du Chien.

Good and bad luck in Iowa

Crossing into Iowa at that point brought me close to Effigy Mounds National Monument, the place with the ridge overlooking the Mississippi lined with bear and other shape mounds. My interest was in the wetlands along the river where a large creek joined it. Nothing great there, but as I followed the Great River Birding Trail north, I had some nice luck, with a Black Vulture, Pelicans, and a Sora included. Rather than go into Minnesota at that point (sorta wish I had) I headed due west in Iowa making for Union Slough NWR. The day was getting late and I found a State Park almost there on the map, so I stayed there. Found some good birds before dark, and a Great Horned Owl later. It was an example of a terribly underfunded place, the restrooms just barely usable, hot water gone, everything just falling apart, no tables or fire-rings. I crashed in the truck, and that was good enough.

It put me in great position for the Slough the next morning right in the heart of fall migration, and I got there before the office opened. I noticed a lot of waterfowl and shorebirds across the road, and set up the scope on the edge to check it out. Best find was Cackling Geese. Once the office opened, I was able to get a map and checklist, and ask some questions. I had hoped for Yellow-headed Blackbirds, but they had all left. Still the tour road was good birding, great for sparrows since they had cut a lot of small brush and piled it anticipating some Prairie restoration burns. Also had two Rough-legged Hawks. Beyond the tour road I went to the South end, which had woods and creek bottom habitat. Found a Northern Harrier, and a Peregrine Falcon. Sweet stuff. I was there for about three hours before heading on west looking for my Nemesis Gray Partridge. I'm still looking. I was able to find some wifi along the way, and there was word of a Green Violet-ear Hummer in Sioux City, I got the address and a phone number and barreled on down the road. All the time driving I'd been watching the ag fields looking for a gray football, the Partridge, without luck. It was around 1 or 2pm when I found the house, after making the worst possible choices of exits and streets. No Bird. A cold front the previous night had driven it off. Folks saw it the day before but not the day I arrived. The couple who hosted it and a pile of birders were sweet and sat talking with me for half an hour, showing pictures and the guest book of visitors. Clearly a big deal in their lives. I wanted to try for some South Dakota birds, and crossed over into the very southeast-most tip of the state. Found a little park, but it was getting to be late afternoon and not very birdy, but I got one tic.

Missouri exhaustion

I still had to get home and wanted to stop in Missouri where there was a Sabine's Gull, another nemesis, reported at Smithville Lake. I'd searched for the same species there before, and was at least familiar with the territory. But Smithville was quite a ways and it turned dark. I knew of a State Park near Squaw Creek NWR, and headed there for the night. There was a power plant nearby, so nothing like quiet. But I was in place for an early start, and also anxious to get home. I was whooped, not only from traveling, but emotionally, the long mourning process was gaining momentum, and was starting to tell. I skipped Squaw Creek and headed straight for Smithville, figuring I might as well have a three strike finale. Hopelessness setting in also, the time of seasonal depression knocking at the door. Anyway, I spent two or three hours at Smithville Lake, and no matter where I went, the Gulls were on the other side. If I drove there, a boat would scatter them back to the original other side, and when I went there, they had moved. I went home, six hours driving to Arkansas.

Indiana and Illinois Lake Michigan sites

Indiana

I crossed the border around mid-day. After getting off the Interstate and driving the local highway through the patchwork of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, a NPS unit, I headed for the beach at the very southernmost tip of Lake Michigan, named Miller Beach, for the town of Miller. There were two birder's there, with scopes. One was Byron Butler, who I had exchanged some emails with, and Ken Brock, autjoer of the "Birds of the Indiana Dunes", and super authority on the area. They were there following up a report of a Reddish Egret, a truly vagrant bird, second Indiana record, and way far from it's normal haunts on the gulf coast. We chatted, exchanged stories, they amazed me with ID-ing skills for flying ducks. I told Ken a story involving his book.

On a prvious trip several years earlier I had bought the book at the Visitor Center for the Lakeshore, and then studied it back at my campsite. I saw that Parasitic Jaeger was on the list for the park, but when I looked at the species description it sounded like it was seen about once a year if somebody got lucky. So I dismissed the thought. The next morning I had stopped at several beaches, and at one had watched a flock of gulls approach. Ther was one that was darker, and more energetic. They finally came almost directly overhead, and the odd gull out even had a tiny extension in the center of the tail. Didn't believe it. Got out the field guides and serched the gulls for somethig all gray in any plumage. Only possibility was Heerman's, and that had never been seen there. Finally let myself be convinced that I'd seen the Jaeger.

The afternoon was slow birding and was getting repetitive, so I followed their suggestion and directions and drove west to the Hammond migrant trap. It's a scrap of woodland near a Casino, maybe a little over a quarter mile long and 100 yards wide at the thickest. But it's the only woodland for miles along the Lakeshore, and attracts a good numbers of a variety of birds. Since I was in Southbound migration time it was a perfect setup, and I wandered through its jumble of old construction debris (anything but pristine place) and scrubby thickets. Found a lot of good birds for my Indiana list, but was getting alarmed by the ominous clouds. Byron and Ken had commented on the forecast. I kept watching the sky over the lake expecting to see a squall line approaching, but nothing looked too pressing. Got to the end of the woods, walked to the side away from the lake and discovered big weather bearing down from the land side. Thrashed around getting to the parking lot, there was a fence, and figured out the truck was about a third of a mile away. Started running; I can't do that for long and the humidity was peaking also. The rain came up behind me hard before I was even half way back, with serious fireworks. I feared a lightening strike, being the tallest structure in a wide flat empty parking lot. and by the time I reached the truck I was sopping wet. I mean squishy soaked. Wiggled into a dry shirt, but my pants made the seat wet for the next two days. After a long drive back to the park campground on the opposite side from Miller, in rain all the way, I waited out the storm, and was finally able to get dry around dark. Had the pants strung up inside the shell with little clamps attached to the interior braces of the shell. Very rustic, kinda like a drowned rat living in a broken washing machine.

Next morning I was back at Miller, as were several other folks, and the Reddish Egret showed up. We got great looks, and careful verbal descriptions and photos. I wanted to go into Chicago, and left mid-morning, allowing for another pass through the trap. More good birds got the Indiana total up to a tolerable 108, much better than I'd expected.

Chicago, Illinois - the Magic Hedge

Getting to the legendary Magic Hedge in Chicago required driving through a lot of not as obviously magic ciyscapes. Lots of Expressway, stealing glances at the GPS trying to figure out where the turns were, rhis being an older piece of software not dedicated to guiding the driver like an automaton. Sorta fun, unless you're in bumper-to-bumper at 60mph. Getting out later was even worse since it was rush hour and I was with the outbound flow. But the two hours or so at the hedge were immensely satisfying. Once I got parked and reluctantly left the truck full of gear and optics etc, deep paranoia was my constant companion. As I birded, I'd keep circling back to check that all was well. After about a half hour of birding alone, I met a local birder (whose name I can't recall, this being written almost a year later). He showed me some places that I wouldn't have expected, like some lakeshore and a little beach, with shorebirds, a few new species, a weed field full of Palm Warblers, a couple of gulls, a bonus Peregrine Falcon, and more passerine migrants, many warblers, thrushes, vireos etc., more new ones than I'd ever hoped for. I ended up adding eighteen species for the Illinois list in about two hours. Then it took about as long to reach something like open country on the way northwest out of town. My theory is that since Chicago is smack against the lake, all the suburbs that should have been to the east got transferred to the west, doubling the thickness of suburban mall rind. It went on and on, with much crawling. I had spotted a likely state park along the northern border, but it took so long to get there that it was dark when I arrived, and I left defore dawn to try to break 100 species in Wisconsin.

Michigan - southern counties

The morning at Sterling SP was pretty good, after a shower before first light. I found the promised Osprey, and in the process found some good brushy edges with some warbler variety. At one spot down a little dirt lane, which looked perfect, I played the atomic bird calling tape, my Screech Owl with Chickadees, which usually will pull every bird within hearing. Nothing. Not a Titmouse, made no sense until I happened to look up at the right branch and found a Cooper's Hawk almost directly overhead. I still needed to get about thirty miles further north to meet an Audubon Field trip which had been announced on the web, so I cut the morning short and headed for Pointe Moilee.

I didn't have very good directions, so a stop at a bait shop got me straightened out. The road I needed was on the other side of the inlet from the larger part of the Conservation Area (or whatever the equivalent Michigan term is) and after driving to the end I found the birders on a platform scanning a nice shallow bay with fringing wetlands. We got god birds there, and more warblers and woodpeckers at a stop along the entrance road. The plan was to go to Lake Erie Metropark on the south end of the Detroit area, which was having a bird festival focused on raptor migration. When we arrived there was quite a crowd split between a number of displays at the visitor center, and another crowd overlooking an inlet of the lake where the raptors generally flew. But it was a cloudy cool morning, and without thermals the flight was weak, even disappointing.

I had met Don Chalfant at the first site, and he greeted my confession that I was doing some state listing with enthusiasm, and a stream of stories. He's a major player whose goal is to average 200 species per state sometime soon. He's somewhere around 180 which really is awesome. We were talking about how the state listing had brought back more interst in birding, which can get repetitive if you stay in the same area. And new birds, lifers, do get hard to find, and more time consuming and expensive. State listing lets a species be a big deal over and over, besides honing ID skills and developing an eye for habitat. We decided to hike some wetland trails in the metropark while we hoped the day would warm and clear. We found some interesting birds, and the sky did start to clear, and the raptors did start to come by, at first ones and twos, but by noon there were some real kettles.

I ended up adding about five raptor species, which was better than I'd hoped. I had to leave in early afternoon to make the next scheduled stop, a visit with friends Barbara and Dale Greiner in Chelsea MI. I had enjoyed their company and Dale's skills when they were on an Elderhostel trip in Arkansas (covered in some previous posts in this blog) and had called and asked if they might want to spend part of a day birding. Arrived mid-afternoon, to prepartions for a neighborhood social they were hosting the next day. So I got to take a relaxing reading break on the deck overlooking their carefully landscaped yard, with numerous native plantings, bird feeders, and many partially welcome chipmunks. They had done a beautiful job of creating habitat on their property, and Dale had some good tales of wildlife sightings not limited to birds.

We got started driving around four pm and headed into the Waterloo State Recreation Area. First stop was a Nature Center for a bird list, but we missed the opening hours. Undaunted, we just started driving around, headed vaguely for some areas where Dale had reports of Sandhill Cranes. It was a mellow drive through an area of mixed woodlands and small farms, including lots of small ponds and larger lakes, some developed for public access. We found a lot of birds, some good ones, Turkeys in a yard, Red-breasted Nuthatch, a pond with some Teal, but were striking out on Cranes. Locals stopped while we were walking roads and told us where they saw them, but none of the leads panned out. Turns out it was so late in the day that the Cranes had headed back to their night roosting area, at a place called Hainele Preserve (or something like that) which was our last stop. The Cranes were there, hundreds of them. Later in the season it would become thousands. An excellent end of day payoff. There was a map there showing their daytime foraging areas, and those were the places we had stopped without luck.

Back to Chelsea for take-out Chinese, and good conversation about their plans for RVing the following year. I was whooped, had been up since around 4 am, and welcomed a fresh real bed rather than my cramped campershell. Dale and I had breakfast in town before I hit the road again, headed for the Sarett Preserve, an Audubon Sanctuary west of Kalamazoo. Great place except for the mosquitos. Lots of trails, lots of small waterways, great wildflowers, and good birds too. Found Olive-sided Flycatcher and Swainson's Thrush after hearing them call from dense tangles all morning. It seems like an old place, parts of it are in need of repair, which is happening randomly, but some features are newly worked over, and there were several staff and volunteers by the time I left. I got some leads on shorebird spots along the lakeshore heading into Indiana, but none payed off except for what must have been the last Yellowlegs, lesser, in the state, on the edge of an industrial puddle.