Early April: This evening at the good shorebird spot on Benton-Carroll Road, along with 28 Dunlins, 61 Lesser Yellowlegs, 286 Pectoral Sandpipers, and others, I found a single American Golden-Plover. (I found out later that Ryan Lesniewicz had seen the bird this morning, so it was here all day.) This species is typically an early migrant, so I was expecting it to show up around this time, but I hadn't seen any reports of golden-plovers yet on the state listserve or the local RareBird forum.
Of course I was curious to know what was happening with golden-plover migration -- were there others around? Had they arrived elsewhere in Ohio? As recently as a couple of years ago it would have been hard and time-consuming to find out. Today I just fired up the BirdsEye app on my iPhone. I may be biased in favor of this app, since I wrote some text for it, but it's incredibly handy for finding out what has been reported to eBird, the massive online database. According to BirdsEye, no American Golden-Plovers had been reported anywhere nearby yet this year.
Later at home, I went online and looked directly at the eBird website, digging around on "View and explore data," and found the same thing there. Golden-plovers had been reported this far north even in late March, off to the west of here (the species migrates north mainly through the Great Plains), but this bird on Benton-Carroll apparently was the season's first in Ohio. Being able to put my own sightings into this broad context of the total species distribution is a remarkable development -- it makes the whole experience of the migration seem more three-dimensional.
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