Today (Thursday Nov. 1) I checked a number of points along the Lake Erie shoreline in Ottawa and Erie counties. While I didn't see any rarities - and certainly nothing that suggested any influence of superstorm Sandy - I was impressed by the sheer numbers of Double-crested Cormorants staging in the upper reaches of Sandusky Bay and elsewhere in these two counties. The biggest concentrations that I saw were just east of the Rt. 2 / Rt. 269 bridge across Sandusky Bay. The best vantage point for viewing the area is from Yetter Road / State fishing access (administered by the Division of Wildlife), which extends south from Bayshore Road in Danbury immediately east of the main Rt. 2 / Rt. 269 bridge. Scanning from that site around midday, I made a conservative estimate of 8000 cormorants visible at once. They were in rafts on the water, in flocks crowded on exposed low islands, and in large flocks in the air. Some birders have a negative view of cormorants (or of any abundant bird, it seems), but I found the sheer numbers of these birds exhilarating.


(And yes, I did scan through the flocks looking for other species of cormorants. No luck on that front.)


The western basin of Lake Erie is much shallower than areas farther east in the lake, so very windy conditions (like those of the last few days) stir up sediments from the bottom and make the water quite muddy; this would present a challenge to birds like cormorants which hunt underwater. It may be that the current huge numbers of cormorants on Sandusky Bay include birds that moved there from the open lake during recent days. Or it could be just normal staging of southbound migrants. Regardless, the clouds of cormorants create quite a spectacle at the moment.


Kenn Kaufman
Oak Harbor, Ohio




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