We headed off to Miller Beach in Indiana today to see if we could find the scoters and other such hard-to-find avifauna that people reported seeing yesterday. Of course, we saw squat, because squat is what we see at Miller’s. The beach always has plenty of gulls, but the oft-reported rarities are never there when we are.

The good news, though, is that we stopped at a few places on the south side of Chicago and managed to find a lifer at Calumet Beach: a CACKLING GOOSE. It’s a fairly new species that was split off from the Canada Goose in 2004, and we’ve been scouring flocks of Canadas for years looking for them. They’re supposed to be a little smaller than Canadas, but truth is, they’re a lot smaller. The one we saw looked like a toy Canada goose. So in the end, it was an easy ID. And, as luck would have it, it’s the third little year bird in a row to be a lifer.

We went to Horicon Marsh in Wisconsin today, not looking for any lifers (not really), but to see the great mass of Canada geese that supposedly congregate there each fall. The geese are supposed to number in the hundreds of thousands, and we wanted to experience the wildness of a sky black with birds that Audubon and others have described. Of course, we didn’t.

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A good day at the Chicago Botanic Garden, for once. It was a nice day, and there were lots of birds. One of them — a WINTER WREN — was a lifer for us both. We saw this dark brown bird with a short, stubby tail dash in front of us, and Pole immediately guessed what it was. We saw it a couple of more times flitting through the shrubbery, and so her hunch was confirmed.

We also so a huge number of golden-crowned kinglets in the deep grasses beside the one of the paths. (I guess that many birds means it was an official flock.) Working a nearby tree was a chubby brown creeper. We then walked the prairie, which was mostly chest high and full of goldfinches and sparrows. And a solitary snipe. Oh, and I don’t want to neglect mentioning the great blue heron that landed about twenty feet away from us, turned its back, and relieved itself prodigiously. We’ve never be so close to a heron before, which I now realize is a good thing.

Today was the first time we’ve gone birding in a couple of weeks. The reasons are mosquitoes, ticks, and the heat. So I guess I’m the kind of guy who lets arthropods run his life. This time of summer is also a drag because of post-migration depression. Most of the avian celebrities have left, and though the local birds are old friends, it’s kind of like you’re stuck hanging around with your relatives. Anyway, we decided to head out to Glacial Park, where we had spotted the short-eared owl back in March. We figured we’d see lots of waterfowl.

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