On the way home from a family affair yesterday, I stopped briefly to view
the "wetlands" at the Coonpath Road intersection of SR 33, (the four-lane
"freeway", not old Rt. 33) north of Lancaster. I hadn't planned to stop,
and didn't have my scope, but with my old glove-box binos, I saw:
Killdeer - 50+
Semipalmated plover - at least 1
Misc. peeps - @ 10
Solitary sandpiper - at least 3
Yellowlegs sp. - @ 5
Possible dowitcher sp.
There were also cedar waxwings hawking insects, and a couple of eastern
kingbirds doing the same, in addition to well over 1000 juvenile and female
red-winged blackbirds.
The water was very low, and algae covered the mud, but it looks like pretty
good habitat right now. Someone with sharper shorebird ID skills and better
optics than I had yesterday will probably do a lot better, but I thought the
spot was worth posting for anyone in the area.
Keep your eyes out for shorebirds at unusual places this year. I have been
seeing shorebirds at the parking lot catch basins that seem to be located at
every new store in north Newark. There have been peeps and solitary
sandpipers at the Kohl's store; killdeer and some unidentified "other" at
the Home Depot, etc. Even the catch basin at the mall in Heath had a couple
of shorebirds.
Also interesting this morning when I walked my dogs about 7 a.m., there were
an estimated 500 chimney swifts swirling around the smoke stack of the old
North Elementary school on Deo Drive. Some of them seemed to be going back
into the stack, but mostly they were just swirling and swirling around the
building, just above the top of the stack.
Have a great day!
Margaret Bowman
Licking Co., OH
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