Usually on a Big Day, you start with nocturnal birds at some o-dark-thirty hour of the morning before hitting your best spot for birds at daybreak. This spot is usually a woodland or wetland area filled with vocalizing birds, but not on this day. Yesterday's gale force northerly winds blew a lot of birds out of here. BUT they also set the scene for great lake movement. So I decided to flip our Big Day and start at the lakefront for a 2hr. lake watch and hit the woodlands later. Also, since the winds Friday night were fairly horrific but were supposed to be calm Saturday night, I decided to do our owling at the end of the day instead of the beginning. I've never done a Big Day that way before so I was a little unsure how our energy level would be at the end of the day. Not sure that this strategy would be that great in May or June, but in November when you have 6 hrs to play with at the end of daylight, that's plenty of time to find owls, so that was the plan for our November Big Day.
I have to say that I'm pretty happy with the way our day played out except we should have hit Third Lake before we went to Almond Marsh. We started our Lakewatch at 7am at the yacht club of North Point Marina (awesome wind block!) and immediately had a few streams of small gulls flying by. The lighting was so bad, though, that we couldn't tell if they were Bonaparte's or Franklin's Gulls. Fortunately we had a BONAPARTE'S fly right into the yacht club harbor for great looks later on. The birds started slowly at daybreak but by 7:30 there was a steady stream all going NORTH!!?? Whaaaat? Why? Why would birds be flying north into a 25-30mph headwind in fall? If anyone can explain that one to me, I would love to hear it. Anyway, the birds kept coming. Mostly RED-BREASTED MERGANSERS, but we had some close flyby WHITE-WINGED SCOTERS, a RED-THROATED LOON just outside the harbor flying in slo-motion against the wind, a couple of COMMON LOONS, oodles of ducks too far away to ID and some dark-winged scoters that were also too far away to ID to species. This is probably the most frustrating thing to me about the lake watch.
Surf and Black Scoters almost NEVER seem to fly close enough to shore to get a decent look at them. I have only once been able to ID flyby Black Scoters, only because I saw the pale cheek patches on the female. So our day started off with some pretty nice birds. We then headed to Waukegan to see if we could find anything else and hopefully get the Laughing Gull and Harlequin Duck that had been around for a few days. The South Port Authority lot was locked (???) Another baffling phenomenon. Why the high security at the port authority? Never in past years have a noticed the gate locked here with the frequency of this year. So, we WALKED AROUND the gate, and checked the south pier for the Laugher to no avail. I don't think that bird was seen by anybody this weekend.
The channel showed no Harlequin so we headed over to North beach to check for shorebirds.....but there was NO SHORE. The waves had swallowed the beach. Literally. The pier was similarly inundated with water and so began our first spectacle of the day....no shorebirds. We had 1 species, and that was because Andy was able to pick 3 KILLDEER out at Independence Grove as light was running out. Contrast this with the 7 shorebird sp. we had last year. Biggest bummer of the day for sure. Still we had no Harly, so we checked the pines and had a nice BROWN CREEPER to go along with the plethora of GOLDEN-CROWNED KINGLETS on the day. While we were there we also checked the channel and saw a suspicious brown bird sitting with a female GREATER SCAUP near Government pier. We walked closer and the bird dived, of course. So we waited, and waited.......and waited some more. Where the heck is this bird? It seemed like a good 10 minutes before we saw it pop up somewhere and then fly in right in front of us. Nice! So we had some classic looks at the female-type HARLEQUIN DUCK before taking off to the Bowen Feeders and Lyons Woods, where we got our necessary woodland birds. At IBSP South we had multiple flocks of PINE SISKINS totaling 150-200 birds and 1 of our 2 HERMIT THRUSHES on the day. We missed Purple Finch, however. The trails and beach were surprisingly dead. The North Unit gave us roadside WINTER WREN, HERMIT THRUSH, and FOX SPARROW but no shrike.
We finished our day heading to Rollins, which has historically been good to us on many levels. We needed lots of ducks and Rollins gave us RUDDY DUCK, SHOVELER, a wheezing WIGEON, AMERICAN BLACK DUCK, LESSER SCAUP, GW TEAL, over a hundred HOODED MERGANSERS, a PALM WARBLER (our only warbler sp.), and our best bird of the day, a NORTHERN GOSHAWK that Steve Bailey saw stoop on a duck and miss and then get chased into a tree by a noticeably smaller NORTHERN HARRIER. We had some extended scope looks at the bird, but he only showed his backside and turned his head to look at us every few seconds. Finally he dove and disappeared into the woods. That's the first Goshawk that I have ever seen away from the hawk watch.
At this point, light was running out and we still needed a lot of birds. Panic set in. Should I go to Third Lake or skip it and go straight to Almond Marsh? Hit Allegheny Ballfields first or last? There were too many questions to answer. In the end, we chose to go to Almond directly and skip Third Lake. This proved to be costly because Third Lake is a popular roosting spot for waterfowl and it was loaded with ducks when we came back to get short-eared owl (which we missed) a little later. Almond had nothing. Zippo. Nada. No Mute Swans, even, so for the first time ever, we missed Mute Swan on a Big Day. Yikes. Independence Grove proved to be a nice stop, however, as it gave us GREAT BLUE HERON, LESSER BLACK-BACKED GULL, and KILLDEER.
Off we headed to Allegheny ballfields where we found.....a LOCKED GATE. Are you kidding? What's with locking gates to open fields and parking lots? you can WALK into these places. Why lock the gates? Incredible. So we crossed the street and drove down Sportsman's Dr. where we had at least 4 or 5 calling HORNED LARKS for our last daytime bird. After missing on Short-eared Owl but incredibly getting calling SORA AND VIRGINIA RAILS for the first time ever in November for me, we headed to the newest owl mecca of Lake County, Pine Dunes FP. In the span of about 10 minutes we had a cat-whining NORTHERN SAW-WHET OWL and 2 EASTERN SCREECH OWLS to finish of a 4 owl day for us.
It was another fantastic day of birding with 2 great birders and some beautiful weather once we left the lakefront. The comparison between last year and this year is also a pretty amazing spectacle. We had 78 sp. this year and 79 last year but we had 19! species last year that we missed this year. Pretty amazing.
Thanks again to Steve and Andy for a great day!
Here's the list:
the list
