Birding In The National Parks: Rare Bird Shows Up At Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore

Picture: RSPB

So, you’re a birder looking to add a nifty pelagic species like the Great Shearwater to your list. Where do you go? Most of us would head to the Atlantic coast, charter a boat, and float around a few miles offshore.

I can’t think of anyone who would go to Lake Michigan and stand on the beaches of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore expecting to see shearwaters. It’s a bird of the open ocean that plunge-dives for squid. There aren’t any squid in Lake Michigan.

Michigan birder Alice VanZoeren knew all of that and wasn’t expecting to see a Great Shearwater from near the mouth of the Platte River in Sleeping Bear Dunes, but that’s exactly what she saw and photographed on September 8th from that precise spot.


Continued: http://www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2012/09/birding-national-parks-rare-bird-shows-sleeping-bear-dunes-national-lakeshore10574

More on the great shearwater (Puffinus gravis):

http://www.birdlife.org/datazone/speciesfactsheet.php?id=3932

http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/g/greatshearwater/index.aspx