When the peak of your favorite hobby lasts only a few weeks each year, you better make the most of that time.

For birdwatchers, that is spring. Specifically, the last week of April and the first two weeks of May. Of course, the spring migration started many weeks ago and will last into June, but the sweet spot is those few weeks.

As luck would have it this year, my niece planned her wedding for mid-May. The wedding was held in my old hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania. I didn’t know it when I was growing up, but Presque Isle State Park in Erie is one of the top birdwatching destinations in the country. Presque Isle is a peninsula jutting into Lake Erie and, in addition to the many birds that nest there, several others use the land as a stopover before crossing over into Canada.

Instead of going home for a long weekend, I took the week off and made a vacation of it. I visited the park for several hours on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Each day I saw something a little different. On Monday’s walk, I saw 51 different species. I did not keep track on Tuesday’s walk as I wanted to focus on photographing some of the warblers.

On Thursday, my brother Paul and I set out with the goal of seeing at least 60 species. The sky was entirely gray for the first several hours of the excursion making seeing detail in the birds difficult, but we still had 48 species when we ventured to a trail that would lead us to Gull Point, a spot where many birds nest on the beach. We did not add to our total during the long walk, but once we reached Gull Point, we added species rapid-fire until we petered out at 58.

We made one more stop on the way out of the park and added five more species to surpass our goal. For the record, great-crested flycatchers was the 60^th bird we found. Finally, as we were about to exit the park, a turkey ran across the road to make our final number 64.

We missed several species I thought we would get, including ruby-throated hummingbird and red-headed woodpecker, which I had seen each of the previous two days. The biggest surprise of the day, bar none, was an American white pelican sharing the point with hundreds of gulls and terns. We also spotted a bobolink in a grassy, but marshy, area between the lake and the bay. It was a strange place to see a bobolink as it wasn’t the typical field habitat where they are usually found.

Warblers, of course, were a main target, and we checked off several of the small migratory birds. Yellow warblers were way too numerous to even try to count. They were, in fact, the dominant species on many of the trails we walked, along with Baltimore orioles and catbirds. Some of the other highlight warblers we found were bay-breasted warbler, Tennessee warbler, northern parula, Cape May warbler and blackpoll warbler. On Tuesday, the warbler action was equally good with a blackburnian warbler being the highlight. 

The varied habitat at Presque Isle is the key to finding so many species. The water attracts birds such as osprey, bald eagles, shorebirds, herons and ducks. The woods and shrubby areas are magnets for warblers and other songbirds.

It would have been a great day regardless of the final species count, but reaching the goal made it that much more exciting. Good times in Erie.