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.