More than 150 brave and bundled souls showed up at The Wilds for the annual winter birding trip with The Ohio Ornithological Society. The weather began as bleakly as expected. The parking lot where we met was solid ice covered in a layer of slush. But there was no wind. My group, co-lead with Peter King and Julie Zickefoose, was group 5, assigned to begin at Long Lake. I knew Long Lake would be frozen (and likely duck-free) so we only drove about 150 yards down the road to our first stop. There we spotted a handful of raptors, including red-tailed hawk (3), rough-legged hawk (4), American kestrel, and what turned out to be the lone northern harrier of the day.
This single harrier, where normally we might see five or more, told us that the small mammal population was probably very low. No food, fewer birds.
Still a four-raptor stop was a great start, so we moved on down the road happily. Well, not everyone was happy. Phoebe and Liam sometimes get a notion to act like going on a birding trip in winter is akin to being condemned to 50 years of doing algebra homework. That "brattitude" would change on this day...we had a secret weapon in our arsenal.
Maybe asking Phoebe to be the trip photographer was not such a good idea.
We got to Long Lake and, as expected, it was frozen solid. Then the wind kicked up and so we headed for some back roads that offered a bit of wind protection. We did have several nice flyovers from trumpeter swans—actual wild trumpeter swans that now spend part of the winter here.
At the Jeffrey Point Birding Deck we spotted lots of white-tailed deer, many of The Wilds' captive large mammals, very few birds, and Papa Green Smurf.
While we scanned for birds (hoping for a golden eagle) along Zion Ridge Road, the sun came out. We hardly knew what to do. Then it began to warm up, thoroughly confusing us. This was The Wilds in January after all. Wha-ha-hoppen?
We thought it might be a trick, so we kept our sensible headgear on just in case.
We bird-dogged some horned larks along Zion Ridge Road after hearing their tinkling call notes.
And that was a life bird for several among us, thus the mandatory Life Bird Wiggle celebration to appease the Birding Gods.
We ended the birding portion of our day with somewhere north of 50 species—a most respectable total. I never did set eyes on a golden eagle, though many others did. For me the skies were empty, but our hearts were full.Next stop: Scratching the Rhino.