I bicycled down to Grand Mere State Park hoping for some good migrants (i.e. purple finch, Louisiana waterthrush, etc) but didn't have a lot of success. I heard or saw several year birds, savannah sparrow, field sparrow, white-throated sparrow, blue-gray gnatcatcher, rufous-sided towhee, but didn't find anything of listable interest. I ran into Jan at the North lake where we watched a faded WW scoter with a quite pale brown tail and she told me she'd heard a Louisiana earlier, but it had quieted by the time I arrived.
The highlight of the morning (actually more like midday) were some small trilliums that I was fairly excited over as I thought they were snow trilliums as they were short and small-flowered. I spent a fair amount of time trying to get a good picture of them in decent light. However, when I got back and pulled a book out I found that the leaves were shaped just like the usual large-flowered trillium and that these must have just been somewhat runty early ones. Oh well.
One of the common new arrivals made it 100 for the Bigby year. Last year I hit 100 on the last day of March. We'll see how things even out in May. Typically I hit 200 for a county in Michigan early in the peak migration somewhere between May 10 and May 15 or so. It's taken about 225 miles of biking to get this far. How many miles will it take to reach 200 this year? I hope it's before mile 1000.
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