Check out the crowds that showed up to look for Britain's first
long-billed murrelet yesterday!
http://www.dawlishwarren.co.uk/birdlatest.html
        Would anything short of a flock of Carolina parakeets cause a turnout
like this here?  Let's hope at least a few folks with good cameras will
be out looking for that possible Arctic loon in Lake Co today.  Thanks
to John Pogacnik for taking a critical look at it. There is a not
altogether satisfactory ID article on the species in the April 1997
Birding.
        Our Saturday trip to the Lake came up with no species worthy of note,
but I did want to mention how spotty the gull flocks were. Fairport
Harbor was pretty much gull-free, with less than a hundred Bonaparte's
dawdling in the harbor mouth and a few of the larger gulls on the
breakwalls. Eastlake PP, on the other hand, was jammed, with perhaps 10
thousand, the majority Bonaparte's in flight, with a good proportion of
the rest herring gulls loafing on the water. East 72nd St had some
action, but it was mostly ring-billeds and not enough to make us loop
back to check them out. Lorain Harbor, however, was wall-to-wall gulls,
as it reliably is this time of year.
        There is great new access to harbor views here. The old taconite piles
on the west bank of the river downtown have been gone for some time, but
in several places the city has opened the fence that once enclosed that
area, enabling access to the end of a pier now under renovation. Check
it out. You can pick your way around the potholes and gulls and have a
view of the hot waters, and all the harbor lakeward of the marina. Here
there were even more gulls than at Eastlake, though ring-billeds
predominated. Until the water freezes this spot should have great
potential.
        A large roost of gulls, a few thousand anyway, hangs out on this pier
now that it's been cleared. For the birds, it probably represents a poor
substitute for the larger roosts we used to see in the big circular
dredge spoil impoundment east of the marina. This was also a great
shorebird haven in years past, all before a last dollop of dredge spoil
was added, changing the hydrology of the site, whereupon Phragmites and
smartweed took over.
        Dredge-spoil reefs and islands have become important refugia for birds
continent-wide these days. As humans take over coastal/lakeside areas,
some birds are able to adapt to us, nesting on gravel rooftops in
shopping centers near water, or on artificial dredge-spoil sites. Can we
use dredge spoil in Ohio to provide nesting areas for terns, or even
piping plovers? Lou Campbell chronicled the use of such islands near
Toledo by up to 5000 pairs of common terns into the 1960s. Wouldn't
bringing these birds back be a lot easier if we reconstructed such
islands, rather than the current system of encouraging a few birds to
nest on floating platforms in diked impoundments?
        Dredge-spoil impoundments, until they were all filled up and taken over
by weeds in recent decades, were rich food sources for migrant birds:
veterans will remember spectacular gatherings, especially of shorebirds,
at the impoundments near the Oregon Power Plant, or Huron, or Gordon
Park, or most recently Lorain.
        A place like Lorain makes one worry about the effect of contaminants on
birds feeding in dredge-spoil disposal sites. The Black River was, and
may still be, Ohio's most poisoned river. The Lorain impoundment to my
knowledge was not used by the scarcer nesting water or shore birds, but
migrants--especially in the fall--sometimes spent up to several weeks
fattening up in the impoundment. Is there evidence they suffered from
contamination? If not, rehabbing these big weed-clogged lakeside
enclosures for spring and fall shorebird foraging and winter roosts of
larids would be an attractive idea. Or I suppose we could make them
sites for gambling casinos...
Bill Whan
Columbus



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