Birds: Winter on Black Lake

Birds on Black Lake and the Holland SP channel...

Lately, Black Lake has had alternating days of open water and ice or partial ice. Waterfowl are present by the 1000s. Yesterday, I watched two tundra swans move from the water where they were swimming and step onto ice, and then I laughed as they slipped and slid, their large black feet not finding purchase. I could see them clearly through my binoculars; they were lovely--all white and feathered with long necks and black bills and still graceful somehow even in their clumsiness on the ice.

And the channel is nearly always a passageway or shelter or playground for a variety of ducks, grebes, mergansers, scoters, loons, gulls.... On very windy days, like today, the huge waves coming in win against the current going out and the movement is west to east. The channel walls constrain the water, the waves increase in amplitude and the waterfowl ride these impressive masses of moving water like slow-moving fluid roller coasters, dipping in and out of sight. The mallards usually crowd against the south wall, but most of the other birds are out in the open.

One day last week, it was very calm and there were tiny ice islands floating west in the channel. Some ducks and gulls were just standing on these pieces and going with the flow so to speak. It was charming to watch them move without exerting themselves.

There is a new boardwalk just east of the channel allowing good viewing as there are often large flocks of waterfowl in the relatively calm waters there. Late yesterday afternoon, there were three White-winged scoters, including a male in full adult plumage. He was coal black with parallelogram-shaped white wing patches, a white "comma" below the eye and a bright red large bill. Somehow, to me, the infraorbital eye marking made him look vaguely malevolent but also such a striking and perfect entity. The westering sun highlighted these scoters which were not especially skittish and stayed close to the boardwalk. They are not that common on the Great Lakes but a few show up every year which makes viewing them a thrill, especially so close up.

Last Sunday, at the end of January, a lot of heavy snow fell throughout the morning. A lot! I went to the channel and spotted a loon from my car so trudged over to try to get a better look, hoping for the Red-throated which had been seen recently. Loons can dive and disappear forever or come up in the next county or such has been my frustrating experience lately, and this one quickly moved down the channel, popping up for a second and diving for much longer. The snow was too deep for me to chase it. However, I spotted what I thought for a second were Long-tailed ducks but soon realized that there were only mallards with snow on their backs and that was cool enough for me to forget about the loon loss.