Yikes! I have some catching up to do with this blog! Here are some highlights from this May so far, beginning with the most recent:
May 11 – A good morning flight of Long-tailed Ducks, with 325 passing by within the first three hours after sunrise. Morning clouds made for good viewing to the southeast where their flight line lay. Five Surf Scoters divided into two flocks flew by at reasonably close range, outnumbered by 20 White-winged Scoters. Also noted were five Caspian Terns at the tip and a pair of Piping Plovers in flight display!
May 10 – A rather slow day, but punctuated with some excitement such as flocks of dozens of Bonaparte’s Gulls appearing in Whitefish Bay and then working their way around the tip and north, and a close flock of 21 Northern Shovelers that rounded the tip at close range.
Northern Shovelers
May 9 – A reasonably decent eight hour count seemed to be picking up steam in the afternoon, so I remained at the shack and watched as it become a phenomenal 14-hour count. There were Red-throated Loons going by in ones, twos, and threes in the morning, but in the afternoon it got crazy, with flocks of 39, 21, 19, 12 and 8 contributing to a total of 200 for the day, with an additional 9 seen by Skye as they flew over the Owl’s Roost feeders! Some visiting birders from Ohio got to see the tail end of this amazing event. As if the Red-throated Loon spectacle weren’t enough, an adult light morph Parasitic Jaeger flew past the tip in the late afternoon, acrobatically engaging a gull before heading north on its way to the Arctic.
May 8 – A rather slow day overall with just 34 Common Loons counted, but one of those was flying with a breeding-plumaged Pacific Loon, so I’m not complaining.
May 6 & 7 – A lonely weekend at the waterbird shack, what with blasting north winds, and visiting birders preoccupied with a Golden-crowned Sparrow coming into the sheltered feeding station, and a Neotropic Cormorant and a stunning and extremely rare male GARGANEY at the Tahquamenon River mouth!
May 4 – A pretty good loon flight with 228 Common and 13 Red-throated tallied.
Willets by Louie Dombroski
May 2 – This foggy day brought a flock of eight Willets to the point. Numerous Willets had been showing up statewide, and I was glad to see Whitefish Point not left out of the action. They wheeled around the tip and landed for a short time on the bayshore beach, but ended up spending most of their day on the breakwall at the Harbor of Refuge.
