Sunday, July 28

Busy busy week. And the moral of the week would be do not delay if you’re counting birds. They don’t really care about your yearly counts.

The girls went down to West Lafayette Tuesday and came back Wednesday. On the way back they swung by Saugatuck for their annual girls outing to have lunch and stare at the high priced merchandise in the boutiques gig.  Meanwhile, on Wednesday word of a couple cattle egrets at Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge came across the listserve. This is a really good Michigan bird. The refuge is a bit over an hour away so as soon as I got off work I drove over. I found the cattle egrets and showed them to two other people that were looking for them.

Lise was busy Thursday so we had to wait until Friday to chase the egrets for her count. We figured (make that I figured) we should be there at dawn to try for rails and least bitterns as well as the cattle egrets. That meant getting up at 4:30 to head over there. Good thing we did. Apparently the cattle egrets left but at least we did get a least bittern and bank swallows.

Meanwhile, Thursday evening a curlew sandpiper showed up in a small Douglas, MI park on a backwater bayou of the Kalamazoo River. All you had to do is stand in the gazebo and look out over the mud flats to see this rarity. The curlew sandpiper nests in Siberia and winters in Africa, but occasionally stops by North America. Years ago Lise and I saw one at Bombay Hook in Delaware. Word went out on the North American rare bird alert and on Friday people came from Chicago and Columbus to stand in the gazebo and see this rare treat.

Friday night Barb called and we decided to make a run for the curlew sandpiper. So the three of us left here at 6:00 AM Saturday for Douglas, MI. Unfortunately the winds changed during the night, the mud flats got covered with water, and the curlew sandpiper headed for parts unknown. So we dutifully spent a couple hours in the gazebo, along with numerous other disappointed birders, hoping beyond hope the sandpiper was just hiding in the weeds and would pop out for our viewing pleasure. Long sigh……. I don’t want to say we were jinxed but Barb did say, “This will be a lifer for me” as we headed out.

The Gazebo of Disappointment in Douglas, MI.

So we had breakfast at the Bluestar Café, a small diner with a Mario Lanza movie poster on the wall. They didn’t have scrapple but you could get gyros meat scrambled with your eggs. Best I can tell gyros is kind of the Greek version of scrapple. Sheep scrapple in a pita.

The Bluestar Cafe. Mario Lanza and Greek scrapple.

Oh, and there was the ugly stilt sandpiper incident. While scanning for the curlew sandpiper a couple of us mentioned that a stilt sandpiper was out there. I thought Lise and I had stilt sandpiper for the year so I didn’t give it much thought. Apparently the conversation took place while Lise was wondering around and no, we didn’t have stilt sandpipers on our count. Well at least one of us has stilt sandpiper now. So the count now stands at 228 for me and 221 for Lise. I’d put a graph up that would probably be my death knell.