We’re now in the dog days of August. Molly has already started swim team practices, meaning our lives are now centered around practices, swim meets, tournaments, and butt crushing, back wrenching bleacher seats.Gotta love it.
Lise and I had an outdoor weekend. Saturday morning we kayaked the Grand River. Hardly a pristine river but the trip was great. Lovely temperatures with swarms of bugs that weren’t interested in us at all. Just smooth cruising.
Lise cruising through the bugs on the Grand.
Saturday night, dining with Barb and Ellen, we decided to do Pte. Mouillee on Sunday for shorebirds.Good birding with good friends. Most fun you can have without scrapple.
Barb the well-equipped birder. (photo by E. McCallum)
Ed and Lise doing Pte. Mouillee. (photo by E. McCallum)
Bird migration as a whole is pretty amazing but the shorebird migration is something different. Birds weighing a few ounces fly from South and Central America to the Arctic in the spring to nest, then turn around and make the trip back starting in August. It’s kind of the ultimate in snowbirding. They breed in the northern latitudes during the northern summer and head to the southern latitudes for the southern summer. Sounds like the ideal retirement to me.
Along the way they need to stop and refuel. There are some pretty critical stopover sites, like the Delaware Bay on the east coast. Places like Bombay Hook in that internationally known speed trap of Leipsic, Delaware, can get tens of thousands of shorebirds at a time. The shorebirds feed on the invertebrates and the local police feed on the birders.
Bombay Hook shorebirds.
In Michigan we have places like Pte. Moo that get hundreds to thousands of shorebirds at a time. With the help of a local birder we did pretty well. For new birds we got Wilson’s phalarope, red-necked phalarope, white-rumped sandpiper, Baird’s sandpiper, and a yellow-headed blackbird. I never expected to get five new species in a single day this late in the year. Barb also got black-crowned night heron and snowy egret for new Michigan birds. The white-rumped and the Baird’s are lifers for Lise and me. My Michigan count now stands at 236 and Lise’s at 230.
Baird’s sandpiper, chowing down.
White-rumped sandpiper. You only see the white rump when it flies.
Semipalmated sandpiper, chowing down.
Red-necked phalarope in winter plumage already.
Yellow-legs with very muddy feet.
Ed's and Lise's Biggish Years 