2022 was an exciting year in that it was the first year to hold the birding blitz since 2019. After not being able to participate in one for two years, I was extremely psyched to be back. This year my team consisted of only myself and my older brother. We had thought about trying a new category and birding only a single county but we ended up sticking with our usual dawn to dusk as the threat of rain loomed.
The night before ended up being a terrible time for me. I was stuck at work four hours later than I was supposed to be. The plan was to spend the night at my parents’ house in Mt. Vernon which was still over an hour from where we would start birding. My sister was going to come take the kids the next day while my brother and I birded all day. My wife had to stay the weekend alone at home to work. I ended up arriving at my parents’ house a little before 9 pm. We were going to get up and start driving at 3:30 am. I didn’t sleep any that night or the previous night.
We made it to Ferne Clyffe at 5 am to start birding and got our Chuck Will’s Widow almost immediately. Soon afterwards, we managed to hear a whippoorwill. Other birds included Louisiana Waterthrush and Barred Owl. We didn’t get any more owl species and no Wild Turkeys either which was a little disappointing. We decided we would stay long enough to find our Worm-eating Warbler at our usual spot before heading south to Fort Massac to get our early morning singing birds. We met another team of Blitz birders there who were most likely looking for nightjars and a screech-owl as well. They were in a car while we were walking down the road.
We added a few more species on the drive down to Fort Massac. We had a good tally of birds there at the hotspot but overall it felt a little underwhelming. We had a lot of big misses already on the day and the singing migrants were not showing up for us.
The next stop was Mermet Lake which we’ve birded extensively in the past. It would be a shorter round for us this time as we needed to target water birds that we wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else on our route. Again, we were coming up empty on a lot of species. We found only a couple of water fowl, some gulls, and no terns whatsoever. Most of the birds we were finding were repeat species. I knew we had to start having some more success somewhere if we were going to beat our 2019 effort. We still had a lot of time but things only seem to get harder to find after the morning.
We decided to stop at Heron Pond Preserve in Johnson county which we had skipped on our last few blitzes because of the short lists. It proved to be a good stop because we added several thrush species as well as a couple of warblers we had missed previously. It’s also just a magical place to visit in general with its bald cypress knees sticking out over the green water. We usually find a good deal of interesting non-bird animals but not so many this time.
Our luck was starting to shift as we birded the backroads in Johnson county finding several grassland birds including Bobolinks. We stopped at a Cypress Creek center and got Bell’s Vireo and Lincoln’s Sparrow. I do not believe we had ever had any of these species on a birding blitz before. We targeted a Black-bellied Whistling Duck spot which was easy to find and full of these southern ducks.
It was a long drive out to Jackson county where time started to fade from us quickly. The distance between points was not far as the crow flies but the roads take you north or south to go east or west. We went to Cave Creek which is big warbler hotspot in the area that we had never seen before. We also couldn’t tell when we had actually “arrived” at the hotspot. We just started getting out of the car along this long backroad and started listening. We found a more confident singing Hooded Warbler as we weren’t 100% sure on what we’d heard at Fort Massac. We also got our first Cerulean Warbler on the blitz as well.
We made our way to Oakwood Bottoms and along the levee in Grand Tower where we’d had little success finding waders and shorebirds in the past. We added nothing at these locations and headed up to Gorham. We found a few shorebirds at a fish farm. We traveled down a few of the backroads to find more but came up empty. We found out later that if we had turned down one more road we would have had a good shot at several shorebirds and terns. However, night was getting closer and we headed out to Murphysboro State Park to find some owls but with no success. As we traveled back to the interstate to go back to Mt. Vernon we heard our final bird of the day, a few Common Nighthawks calling above the town of Murphysboro.
We ended the day with 122 species. I never tallied up the number until we were back at our parents’ house. We beat our previous blitz effort by 10 species. We still scored relatively low compared to the other teams who had 24 hours to bird but I don’t believe those extra night hours would have helped us any. It seems to all come down to the route and knowledge of where everything is. Several teams do a “count week” before a big day which is something we only dream about. We decided that we would try a county big day next year to limit the distance traveled between birding areas. Since we finally explored Jackson county a little more this time we think it would be a good starting county for us. I’ve always wanted to bike Johnson county however, if only to take in how pretty it is.