Black-legged Kittiwake

For nearly two weeks, the Michigan birding listserv described a Black-legged Kittiwake at Grand Haven. For the first week of the sightings, the weather was very wintry, so I guess I expected the Kittiwake (rare for Michigan) would not stay around. But it did and then there were two of them. BLKIs usually winter at sea, off the coasts of New England and the Maritime provinces and then breed in the far north. But, this is what makes birding exciting.....here they were, in my backyard, so to speak.

Finally, Maria and I drove to GH last Friday, stopping at Pigeon Lake on the way where we saw a bonanza of mostly black, white and reddish birds: swans, buffleheads, common goldeneyes, ring-necked ducks, scaups, red-breasted and common mergansers, a solitary striking hooded merganser very near the shore, redheads, canvasbacks, a bald eagle, coots and Canada geese. On to GH, where we found the BLKI venue, but it was inclement and Maria had had chemo earlier that week and didn't feel like standing out in the wind. So that was a reconnaissance trip.

On Sunday afternoon, I went back and stood on Chinook Pier on the channel for 90 minutes with about 2 dozen other birders, several with spotting scopes and digiscopes. It was in the high 30s and not too uncomfortable, at least for awhile.

I saw white-winged scoters, including a male in breeding plumage, black with the white comma around his eye and white wing patch, along with four or five females or juveniles. There were ring-billed and Herring gulls, mergansers, goldeneyes, a few swans, buffleheads, etc. I chatted with a couple of guys. We all watched bald eagles periodically stir things up by flying around high in the sky. The gulls and other waterfowl would half-heartedly fly up and about, but quickly settled in again when the eagles left.

No Black-legged Kittiwakes though. I left as my digits started to freeze and the wind increased.

That was Sunday. On Tuesday, I saw that a kittiwake had been seen around 6 p.m. on Monday, so after dithering and carrying on the inner dialogue about whether to try for it or not, I finally just went, leaving at 4:30 p.m.

There were only a few cars in the parking lot where one can stay in a warm car and sort of look out over the docks and the channel where there is a mix of jumbled ice and open water. (The docks are bubbled here which accounts for the open water and which attracts the waterfowl.) I kept looking through the binocs at the gulls flying by and within 10 minutes I saw it!

I quickly got out of the car and got good looks at it for about 5 minutes, as it swooped and circled gracefully overhead. I was totally thrilled! This is a bird that looks a lot like a gull, a rather small delicate gull with grey mantle, white head and all-black wingtips--like they have been "dipped in ink." This bird was a juvenile and had a black terminal tail band, the distinctive black M-pattern on the wings and best of all, the black markings on the white head. It was buoyant and flew fast overhead, back and forth, for a few minutes and then headed west down the channel and was gone. I hung around another 30 minutes, but it didn't come back.

The western sky all the way home was stunning as seen from Lakeshore, reddish and golden and brilliant beyond the tall, black, silhouetted trees on the dunes.

There were scaups, goldeneyes and swans near the bridge at Pigeon Lake. They were swimming about in new areas of open water, pink-tinted from the sunset, and still bordered by fissured ice.