May 1, Point Pelee, Ontario

Bringing it all back home again. So today is an auspicious day. It is the first day in seven years I am not in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan within the month of May. Waking up at my parents home in southeast Michigan today, exhausted from flying in last night from Oregon, I honestly wasn’t thinking about birding plans for today, and the fact that today was May 1st was kinda lost on me. But as I crashed at my folks, I looked at the nexrad radar, saw a huge surge of birds to the shores of Lake Erie with torrential rain hitting hard. That tends to make for a great next morning of birding and as sad as I was to do it, I set an alarm. Ouch! But within a few hours, I was in my jeep crossing under the Detroit River on my way to the legendary Point Pelee Ontario! I grew up learning to bird at Pelee. As a kid, my grandmother took me several times a year to Pelee, and it is where I saw so many of my first warblers and other neotropical migrants. However, I had not birded there in 18 years now and was slowly transmuting my exhaustion to growing excitement (via the magical power of coffee!) to finally return to the place I learned to bird.

Anyways, enough of the preamble, lemme talk about the birds! So I rolled into Pelee about an hour after sunrise and headed straight for tip to see if there was any morning flight. There was a little stream of warblers, orioles and buntings but the lighting was pretty poor and I decided it would be more fun to beat the bushes along the lee side of the point.

It took a little while for the birds to settle down and start to feed, but soon I was picking through the decent numbers of Palm, Black-and-white, Yellow, Myrtle and Nashville Warblers for goodies like my first Blackburian & Magnolia Warblers of the year, and marveling at the large fallout of White-throated Sparrow sprinkled with a surprising amount of Field Sparrows within them, including foraging in some pretty forested habitat! I was really pleased with encountering a Grasshopper Sparrow under a juniper, and the locals were excited for a few Clay-colored Sparrows bopping around. The local birders went on to tell me today was the first day that real action had hit Pelee and before this morning, very little had arrived. In addition to the Grasshopper Sparrow, I was really pleased to find two Sedge Wrens and a Marsh Wren; both species common enough in the right habitat, but to find in a brushy-edged forested lakeshore is always a treat.

A Eared Grebe preened offshore, but my favorite sighting was a really cooperative Prairie Warbler. I saw quite a few of these handsome birds in south Florida, but it has been several years since I have seen one in a Great Lakes migration hotspot! A couple of Least Flycatchers and Blue-headed Vireos complemented the Hammond’s Flycatchers and Cassin’s Vireos I was just looking at less than 24 hours earlier in Portland. After a week of carefully studying and reacquainting myself with Cassin’s Vireos, it was nice to get the real life comparison of those bright Blue-headeds. I really had to tear myself away by the late afternoon so I could get ready to head to the Biggest Week in Birding tomorrow. A brief stop at Belle Island on the Michigan side of the river continued the fallout of all the White-throated Sparrows and I had a great look at a female Eastern Towhee, but overall, felt I had done my part to honor the arrival of May with many warblers in the face thoroughly enjoyed!