Reflecting on my 2022 Big Year, it really wasn’t until April that the year became big. Of course, as with the first three months, I still adamantly maintained that I wasn’t doing a big year, but by this point I definitely had myself set on the goal of breaking as many Big Month records as I could manage, and as I mentioned in March’s post I definitely liked seeing my name atop the eBird Top 100 list, and felt a compulsive desire to keep it there. This meant that April’s target would be 204 – one higher than the standing MichListers record of 203 – plus I wanted to snag as many new year birds as I could to stay atop the list as I reasonably could. “Reasonably”… keep that word in mind.
The first of my April trips came after I got out work on the evening of the 3rd and drove a few hours west to Muskegon, sleeping in my car at a Carpool Parking Lot near Muskegon Wastewater (MWW). In the morning at MWW I snagged assortment of month and year birds, including my Lifer Eared Grebe, and afterwards I headed south towards Berrien country, where I picked up my Lifer Fish Crow. From there I began the drive home, stopping at Ranger Highway in Lenawee where I spotted “Lily”, an annual visiting Whooping Crane. Lily is considered by the Michigan Bird Records Committee and by MichListers to be an “uncountable” bird due to his origin as a raised-in-captivity bird, a somewhat contentious topic. As a result of this I didn’t count Lily on my Big Year list but I do consider him a Lifer, making April 4th the first of four days in the next month-and-a-half where I would manage 3 Lifers in a day.
The next day I was supposed to stay home and watch our pet dog Frankie, but I couldn’t not jump in my car and race the hour-and-a-half to St Clair when resident birder Joanna Pease spotted a Tufted Duck in the marsh that makes up her back yard. Of course I couldn’t neglect Frankie, so I tossed his car seat in the car and took him with me, getting there just in time to spot a late lingering Snowy Owl and more importantly my Lifer Tufted Duck. While at the stakeout, after spending some time hanging out with Frankie, birder Andrew Simon spotted my first-of-year Common Gallinule, and upon my celebration of the fairly-common year bird showing nearly as much enthusiasm as that of my Lifer Tufted Duck, several birders present asked me a question that I would hear nearly every time I met anyone for the next few weeks: “Are you doing a Big Year?”. I of course again, as always, insisted that I wasn’t.
A few days later a Cinnamon Teal was spotted back at Muskegon Wastewater, so of course I drove out the evening of the 9th after getting out of work and was on site at dawn. After spending a short while looking for the bird it was located by Michigan Big Year regular Myles McNally, who most years pursues the target of 300 Michigan Birds for the year. Once he got me on the bird we spent a few minutes chatting and he asked me “Are you doing a Big Year?”. Yet again I said no, and but did say I had the hope of possibly hitting 300 for the year, to which he replied he had no doubt I’d be there come fall, let alone December. I told him I still thought it was a longshot, then looked at my phone to see a Western Meadowlark had been spotted at the Mroczek Sod Farms in Van Buren county, about an hour and a half south of MWW. I told Myles I had to jet, and he replied “Yeah, you’re doing a Big Year.”
After making the drive to the Sod Farm it didn’t take long for me to pick up my second Lifer of the day in the Western Meadowlark, plus a year bird in Brewer’s Blackbird. While I was there I started looking at any other possible birds I could add to my totally-not-a-Big-Year-list, and I settled upon driving three hours back north to the First Street pier in Manistee to pick up Lifer #3 of the day, Red-necked Grebe. Reasonable, right? Two days later on the 12th I headed back down to Pointe Mouillee SGA to haul in a bunch more month and year birds before heading home, and the very next day on the 13th I made the same drive again after getting out of work in order to pick up my Lifer American Avocet at Erie Marsh Preserve, a fantastic spot along the Lake Erie coast just a new miles north from the border with Ohio.
Just another two days later I would again return to Pointe Mouillee when a Little Blue Heron was spotted. I got there pre-dawn and walked the three-or-so miles out to where the bird had been seen, and just as I got there I watched the bird fly in and drop down into a spot where there was no way I would have ever spotted it had I been there five minutes later. I periodically spotted it as it worked its way through the Marsh and then took flight, flying towards Justin Labadie as he raced out on his electric bicycle, passing him and then dropping out of sight never to be seen again. Just a few minutes later, or possible even a few minutes earlier, and I would have never seen it.
The morning after picking up the Little Blue Heron I joined my dad for another trip to Muskegon Wastewater. See, when the Cinnamon Teal showed up he had been out of state and as such this was his first opportunity to try for it. It wasn’t his first opportunity to try for Cinnamon Teal in Michigan, however, but rather his fourth. Just two years prior, in May of 2020, a Cinnamon Teal had showed up at the Corey Marsh Ecological Research Center, where he had taken three visits and spent a total of over seven hours looking for the bird – one that seemingly everyone but him had success finding. The demoralizing nature of these dips had left Cinnamon Teal as a bigtime Nemesis bird of his. For those unaware, a Nemesis bird is a bird you have chased after and tried for several (or sometimes several dozen) times without success.
At MWW, as we were looking for the Teal, we ran across several birders including Todd and Karen Palgut (who are the 3rd and 4th people in the cover image for this Michigan 337 series, along with Justin Labadie in the second spot and me in front), who after briefly greeting my dad were excited to meet me, as by this point it was evident to everyone that I was doing a Big Year. They of course asked “Are you doing a Big Year?”, and I of course denied the charge. After a bit of socializing and a lot of searching, our phones pinged with a Discord notification that Matt Igleski had spotted the bird, and a short while later we were returning home. My dad had vanquished one of his three biggest Nemesis bird. In just over a week, I would earn my first. The next day I would once again head south to Erie Marsh Preserve when some Marbled Godwits were found – and after picking them up I headed back to Lapeer to spend the night at my parents’ house because my dad and I had plans for the morning of the 18th.
At MWW, as we were looking for the Teal, we ran across several birders including Todd and Karen Palgut (who are the 3rd and 4th people in the cover image for this Michigan 337 series, along with Justin Labadie in the second spot and me in front), who after briefly greeting my dad were excited to meet me, as by this point it was evident to everyone that I was doing a Big Year. They of course asked “Are you doing a Big Year?”, and I of course denied the charge. After a bit of socializing and a lot of searching, our phones pinged with a Discord notification that Matt Igleski had spotted the bird, and a short while later we were returning home. My dad had vanquished one of his three biggest Nemesis bird. In just over a week, I would earn my first. The next day I would once again head south to Erie Marsh Preserve when some Marbled Godwits were found – and after picking them up I headed back to Lapeer to spend the night at my parents’ house because my dad and I had plans for the morning of the 18th.
Up at Tawas Point State Park a Say’s Phoebe had been located by Tawas birding legend Phil Odum, which my dad and I successfully managed to snag after a short stakeout where a few birders asked me “Are you doing a Big Year?”, and I replied “I don’t know, maybe?”. Also present at the stakeout was Adam Byrne, head eBird reviewer for Michigan and holder of the long-standing Michigan Big Year record of 329, which had been set in 2005 and stood unbroken until 2020 when Oliver Kew tallied 335. As Adam stood nearby my dad and I debated whether we should try for the Yellow-crowned Night-Heron in at the Nurnberg Rd. swamp in Mason county or a pair of Lark Sparrows that had been being seen somewhere else, at which point Adam chimed in: “You should go for the heron, you’ll get more opportunities for the sparrow.” We took heed of his advice and drove to Mason for the heron before heading home after a fantastic day of birding.
Two days later my phone pinged at work, the ever-familiar sound of Discord notifying me someone had posted to the Michigan-wide Rare Bird Alert channel. There was a King Eider in Ludington Harbor. I of course hopped in my car after work and raced across the state to try for it. When I arrived at the harbor it was pouring rain, and myself and a few other birders tried without success for the bird for a short while, and just as we were getting ready to give up we saw a couple of people with spotting scopes coming back from farther down the breakwall. As they approached us we glumly asked “any luck?”, to which they gleefully responded “Yeah! It’s right out there!”. The group of us quickly followed their directions to where the bird was and shortly after got on it, and as I was submitting my eBird checklist I quickly checked the recent reports to see if I could find the name of the guy to thank him. It didn’t take long to find the name Alec Olivier, and so I made sure to acknowledge him in my report. I’d never heard the name before, but in just a couple months I’d be able to thank him in person.
Over the next few days I made several trips down to Point Mouillee and Erie Marsh Preserve, where I rapidly picked up new month and year birds as an early wave of migrating warblers hit us. By the end of the month – after yet another drive across the state to Muskegon Wastewater – I found myself sitting at 206 birds for the month, a whopping 23 birds higher than the previous record of 183 which I had thought would be near-impossible to break. Included in those last few days was my third day of 3 Lifers on the 29th, when I snagged American Goshawk (then Northern Goshawk), Kentucky Warbler, and Wilson’s Phalarope all in one day.
One bird I did not snag during that last week of the month, however, was Western Tanager. On the 27th a Western Tanager was found a short distance north of my home in Oakland county at the feeders of a Tuscola county birder. Unfortunately on the 28th meeting in the morning and worked a mid-shift with just a few hour gap in between, so I couldn’t chase the bird until the evening unless I raced straight from the meeting to the stakeout before having to race back to work after spending just a 15 minute window watching the feeders for the bird. I decided that would be too excessive even by my standards and would leave me with far too short a window, so I opted to wait until after work to head up with my dad. Unfortunately by the time we got there the bird had been MIA for a few hours, and it would never be seen again. On the drive home I, for whatever reason, decided to check and see exactly when I would have been there had I followed through with the insane idea, and quite miserably learned that the bird had been there for the entirety of the fifteen minute window I would have had to try for it. Ugh.
Fortunately though 2022 turned out to be somewhat of an incredible year for Western Tanagers in Michigan, with an unprecedented number of them being reported between Facebook and Discord. They are typically a species that would normally only have around one or two occurrences in the state each year, so there’s no way I would I would dip fifteen times on eleven different birds over the course of the next few months, right? Right?
Regardless of any ominous foreshadowing, April had been truly a spectacular month. I had shattered the April Big Month record, picked up thirteen Lifers, and catapulted myself to over thirty species ahead of Brandon Aho, who sat at the #2 spot on the eBird Michigan Top-100 for 2022. Throughout April I had driven an astonished 6000 miles, though even more astonishing than the fact that I drove 6000 miles was the fact that April is only the month where I did the third most driving in 2022, and is less than half the mileage of the month in first – and by the end of April I had firmly done a 180 the the answer of the ceaselessly-asked question. Yes, I am doing a Big Year. Unfortunately though as I looked at the MichListers May Big Month record I knew my days of record-breaking were over, because there was no way I was beating Adam Byrne’s 1994 tally of 238, right? To find out tune in to tomorrow’s issue of “Michigan 337”, “May 2022 – The Biggest Month in Michigan Birding History”.
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