We were in the middle of our annual visit to Holland, Michigan (Karen lived there for many years so we have to visit all her relatives and watch sunsets over Lake Michigan) when we got a phone call from our good friends the Mannings. They are our Michigan Birding Buddies and we get out with them as much as possible when in Holland. They informed us that a Wandering Tattler had been reported at Holland State Park, which was 5 minutes away from us, and we had to go see it! Now we’ve seen Wandering Tattlers in California and the Galápagos Islands so it wouldn’t have been a Lifer for us. So why the urgency?
Here’s a range map from eBird of where the Wandering Tattler has been observed:
As you can see, the purple (denoting the area where it has been reported) coats the coast Alaska and down the west coast of Canada, United States, and down into Central America. Notice there are hardly any purple dots west of the Rocky Mountains. In fact someone found only eight reports of Wandering Tattlers west of the Rockies – and no previous reports of one in Michigan. This is what is called a Mega-Rarity!
Every birder in the area wanted to see this one. There were 25 people looking for it in the state park when we arrived and more were showing up every minute. Unfortunately for us, it was a classic case of, “You just missed it”. It had been seen on and off for five hours; we watched for another hour, but to no avail. We had dragged Karen’s brother and sister there and they were getting a little bored so we went back to our rental thinking it had left the area.
An hour later we received a text from the Mannings that it had reappeared! Karen and I jumped back into the car (Kris and Tom politely declined our invitation to go back) and sure enough it was hopping around the rocks protecting the south pier of the channel leading out into Lake Michigan. The bird was a good 150 yards away so it was hard to use Auto-focus so I closed the Aperture to ƒ13 to increase the depth of field and used viewfinder magnification to manually focus. I had to crop the shots heavily to increase the size of the bird in the frame during post-processing. Below are a couple of the shots I took, recognizing that they are not Great Bird Pics by any means but they do document a Mega-rarity for the state of Michigan.
Thanks again to the Mannings (the best birders in Western Michigan) for getting us on the bird. Do you have a tale about tracking down a rarity? Let me know and we’ll write it up for the site.
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