My good friend Leslie Sours and I decided to spend the day birding at Pickerington Ponds, located in Canal Winchester. To start out the day, we walked the Yellowlegs Trail right across from the office in hopes of finding an Orange-crowned Warbler. We didn’t find any of them, but we did find a small flock of 5 White-crowned Sparrows. After not finding much activity at the first spot, we decided to head over to the Arrowhead Trail near the Glacier Knoll Picnic Area to see what could be found there. It was pretty slow at first, but we hit the sparrow jackpot!!! With 6 species of sparrows, the highlights were 22 (yes; TWENTY-TWO!) White-crowned Sparrows, 3 Lincoln’s Sparrows, and even a surprising Fox Sparrow. The White-crowns consisted of a pretty even split between adult and immature birds, with the adults being extremely vocal and singing nonstop. In fact, there was almost never a moment when their song wasn’t within earshot. It took us two and a half hours to comb over the half of the trail that we did, but there really weren't any dull moments. Our last stop was over at the Wood Duck Picnic Area, which had our highest species diversity of the day (34 total). There was some nice proof of waterfowl migration, with the stars being 2 American Wigeon, 4 Northern Shovelers, 6 Northern Pintails, and an impressive flock of 44 Green-winged Teal. Upon further scoping of the edges, we discovered a small flock of shorebirds that included 1 each of Greater and Lesser Yellowlegs, 4 Dunlin, 1 Least Sandpiper, 10 Pectoral Sandpipers, 3 Wilson’s Snipe, and even a pair of late Semipalmated Sandpipers. Also of note were 3 Rusty Blackbirds working the brush on the far edge of the water, and a trio of Sandhill Cranes. At the end of our 7 hour day, we had 54 species, which I can’t really complain about! 

Bird on!

Alex Eberts
#RogueBirders
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