June 8 2017. Nayanquing Point State Wildlife Area, Michigan. Describing a road trip around Michigan as an expedition is a bit of an exaggeration, expeditions surely imply a measure of hardship and some confrontations with the unknown; hardly what you get in Michigan. Nevertheless, this was the last day of what we understood as our Michigan expedition and we were making our way back to the familiar landscapes of Ontario; Nayanquing Point State Wildlife Area was on our way. It is a managed wetland on the shore of Lake Huron not far from the once thriving industrial city of Saginaw. Saginaw by the way was formerly a very prosperous manufacturing city with ties to the fortunes of Detroit and the auto industry; but….
Nayanquing is good wetland birding. In a couple of hours we tallied about forty species including Caspian Terns, Trumpeter Swans, Pied-billed Grebes, a pair of nervous Sandhill Cranes and this lovely little Common Yellowthroat.
We were hoping to see Least Bitterns but didn’t despite an intensive scrutiny of likely habitat. Least Bittern has become something of a nemesis bird for me. I remember seeing just one about thirty years ago, then I picked up a dead one at the roadside within the last five years and I know where to go to hear them but seeing them is another matter.
Another target bird was Yellow–headed Blackbird, a species I had never seen, not surprisingly because it’s a bird of the western half of the continent. It took a bit of finding and when we did I was rather distracted by the intriguing landscape in which we encountered it. We had wandered away from the trails towards the shoreline and found ourselves in a small oak savannah on a narrow sandy strip of beach that separated the inland marsh from the cold waters of Lake Huron; I wish I’d taken more time to investigate and understand this isolated and probably fragile ecosystem. While trying to understand the landscape, the ecology and to identify the oaks (they were Black Oaks) that sheltered us from the onshore wind, we became aware of a near cacophony of musical squeaks and parrot-like HhShhhh sounds coming from those same encircling oaks. We soon tracked down the culprits, a small group of male Yellow-headed Blackbirds: immediately My Birds of the Day.
Birds of the Day for several reasons: I’d never seen one before so it would be an addition to my life list should I ever compile one; They were startlingly larger and more imposing than I’d anticipated, I had imagined them be about the same as Red-winged Blackbirds but substituting yellow heads for red wings; And they reminded me strongly of the raucous Yellow–winged Caciques common in the urban parks of western Mexico, so strongly that, for a while, I wondered if they were closely related; it turns out they’re not.
I managed to get just one reasonable Yellow-headed Blackbird photo, here it is along with one of those Mexican caciques (kahHEEkays). And you know, in the cold light of day they are quite different – the challenge of birding.
