For my 2nd birding blitz I wanted to do the Muscle-powered divison. In this category no gas-powered transportation could be utilized. I had convinced a couple of bike-riding friends to come along with me so I could have a team. One of the friends dropped out a few days before the blitz. My wife wasn’t going but my younger brother decided to give it another go. My daughter who was 5 years old had it in her mind that she was going to go. She was actually really upset when she found out she was not going to be a part of the “biking and birding thing”. I had a great route planned out that I thought was very doable on a bike. Nothing was going to go as planned.
The forecast was rain for the day. The other Muscle-powered team had decided to switch to another division. We were asked if we wanted to do the same but I was not afraid of getting wet and we were now winners by default so I kept with my plan. Rhonda told me we could drive from place to place to move bikes around but that we couldn’t count any birds we saw from the car. I found this to be cheating and was bothered that it was even suggested. I wondered how many muscle-powered big days were in fact false in this way. But then again nothing was going to go as planned.
We once again spent the night at my parents’ house in Mt. Vernon as we would for every blitz ever. Again we rose at 3 AM to drive down to Ferne Clyffe State Park. I remember heavy rain with near zero visibility the whole drive there. I also can barely recall any birding blitz where this was not the case. Our bikes strapped to the back of my car were soaked. When we arrived at Ferne Clyffe it was raining heavy enough that it was very hard to hear birds. We got a Chuck Will’s Widow right away and even got a visual of its dark silhouette moving through the undergrowth outside of the woods. It was very cold. I was shivering a lot and we got back in the car for a little while so I could warm up. My hands could barely grip the binoculars. We stood under a kiosk and I was able to log a few of the same species we had the previous year on the lake.
We hiked a different trail this time to try and get some more species. My friend who was the newcomer was a photographer but did not have much luck on this outing. I remember seeing a Wild Turkey walk across the path as I walked with my umbrella shielding my binoculars to no avail. We only logged a few common species before settling in a cave while we tried to wait out the rain. An Eastern Phoebe frequently landed on a branch next to the cave and we watched it to try and find its nest. We found a nest for a Carolina Wren in the cave as well. We decided that birding there was getting no where and went back to the car to find a new place to get the bikes out. We logged 19 species.
I counted 11 species along the road as we drove to the next spot. We could count none of these birds as part of our blitz total. I really didn’t want to drive but we were going to have an awful experience if we didn’t escape the rain. One of my fondest memories blitzing in Southernmost Illinois is the country roads lined with goldenrod that seem to be teeming with meadow birds. There was a Northern Mockingbird and a Green Heron. Two species we would never find again the rest of the day.
We went to Heron Pond as our new starting point. We had better luck along the trail here as the rain had stopped for the moment. We added Veery and Wood Thrush. I recall my brother impersonating a Barred Owl very closely and getting a distant one to call back to us. We logged 5 warbler species and Summer Tanager. We found 27 species total at Heron Pond that day. We were there for almost 4 hours. It was more hiking than birding. When we walked out of the woods we got everything set up on our bikes to ride along the roads and add some species that we missed because we were in the car. Dark clouds loomed ahead. My friend said I looked unsure about the plan. We ended up loading our bikes back on the car and finding a new spot.
We ended up further North in Williamson county where the sun was shining bright and frying us. We rode our bikes up and down the main road through Crab Orchard and through Pigeon Creek and Wolfcreek Causeway. We tallied 57 total species at Crab Orchard where we finally were having a true biking and birding experience. My brother was lagging behind on his Walmart special bicycle. I’m a fairly fast cyclist myself. We had to take frequent stops but luckily that’s what you do when you are birding. I finally added a Black Vulture on a blitz as well as Blue Grosbeak and Yellow-throated Warbler. The last two birds added were Common Nighthawk which was in the woods where we flushed it from high up in a tree and a calling Eastern Wood-Pewee.
My binoculars were ruined by the rain that day. I think it was the last blitz where I would have such cheap binoculars. It was also our worst one with only 69 species logged. No blitz after this Sophomore effort would ever be the same. Once again we would skip the meeting the following day as I had a horrible head ache after being extremely cold in the morning only to get sun poisoning in the afternoon.