Following my return from the Great North, I gave myself a month off of travel, confining myself to city limits for short, infrequent birdwatching walks. But this past week, a friend and I hopped on an early flight destined for Detroit, Michigan where we would spend the next four nights. Birding was not the primary focus of the trip, but I did get out a few times to see some birds and add some more color to my eBird states map.
We arrived in Detroit at 8am on Thursday and called our hotel to request an early check-in. The hotel was booked full, but they squeezed us in which was absolutely awesome seeing as we were operating on very little sleep when our plane touched down. After a few hours rest, we headed out to explore and wandered alongside Detroit River from Hart Plaza to the William G. Milliken State Park and Harbor. The sparrows were numerous: white-throated, white-crowned, chipping, juncos, etc. The ring-billed gulls were also out in number.
The next morning, I woke up early and caught a ride to the University of Michigan-Dearborn campus where I wandered through the Environmental Interpretive Center's wooded backyard. It was a neat space with plenty of little trails winding through the trees.
The temperature had dropped into the low thirties, and at first my chilly walk was worryingly quiet. I happened across plenty of squirrels and a doe or two but was seeing few birds for the first twenty or thirty minutes. However, as the sun rose behind the clouds, so did my luck.
Perhaps the coolest moment happened just before I encountered him. I had just paused on a trail when I heard something in the nearby brush and turned to my right where a buck stood staring straight at me from no more than ten feet away. The buck didn't budge. I slowly lifted my camera, and right as I put the viewfinder to my eye, the battery died, and before I could change it, the buck had moved on through the brush and out of sight.
The black-throated blue warbler would be the only lifer species of the trip, but I did catch sight of some other fun fall migrants as I walked around the EIC including ruby- and golden-crowned kinglets, yellow-rumped, Nashville, orange-crowned and palm warblers, ovenbirds and more. After spotting a brown creeper marching up the side of a nearby tree, I happily headed into the EIC building for a drink of water and also browsed the neat collection of wood-crafted birds.
I would sneak in another short stroll along the Detroit River the following morning, but my weekend was otherwise packed full. More on that in a future post.
