Birding Unusual Places

Larry of the Brownstone Birding Blog recently challenged birders to birders to check out a location in their area that they have never birded before and to file a report on what they see. An interesting challenge indeed, and one that I intend to follow-up on soon, but not here. Instead, Larry’s post got me to thinking about some of the more unusual places that birders pick to do their birding.

Birders seem to make a habit of seeking out unusual and often unsavory places in which to pursue their hobby. Landfills (for gulls) and sewage treatment plants (for shorebirds) certainly top the list. And while turf farms aren’t unsavory, they certainly might be considered unusual places to bird, except for the fact that they attract certain species—such as Baird’s (Calidris bairdii) and Upland (Bartramia longicauda) sandpipers—that are often hard to find elsewhere.

Charles T. Flugum, a Minnesota farmer, did all or most of his birding from the seat of a tractor. He even wrote a book about the birds he saw while tending his fields.

And David Patick, a birder from Huntington, West Virginia, recently drove in excess of 350 miles (about 5 ½ hours) to add Fish Crow (Corvus ossifragus) to his West Virginia life list. And where did he find the elusive Fish Crow? In the parking lot of the Martinsburg Mall.

My unusual birding place was a 1 to 3-mile segment along the right-of-way of the New York Central System where it traversed the rural countryside of southwestern Michigan between Detroit to Chicago. This didn’t seem unusual to me at the time. In fact, it was my normal stomping grounds (my “patch,” to use today’s British vernacular) in my early teens. The tracks offered many advantages: (1) they provided an elevated vantage point from which to scan the habitats lining both sides of the right-of-way; (2) the rails and ties provided a stable and level surface for easy hiking; (3) they provided me easy access to a variety of habitats that would otherwise have been inaccessible. The major disadvantage, of course, was having to keep my eyes and ears open for approaching trains