Birdathon 2025 Highlights!
To say SWMLC’s Birdathon team, the Land Larks, were excited about this year’s event is an understatement!
Thanks to your support, we raised $3,030 towards habitat restoration at Wolf Tree Nature Trails!
Thank you!
SWMLC’s 2025 Birdathon Team, the Land Larks: Ashley Cole-Wick, Mitch Lettow, Dave Brown, Jessica Hagen, with Kaleigh Winkler in front.
Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy’s (SWMLC) team, the Land Larks, counted 113 species, the same number as last year! Your support will help transform an overgrown one-acre field at Wolf Tree Nature Trails into a rich oak savanna bursting with lupine, butterflyweed, and other native wildflowers. Not just eye-candy for humans, this planting will benefit seed-munchers like sparrows and finches, and insect-feasters like bluebirds and swallows.
Thank you for your support and love of nature (and birds) in southwest Michigan!
The Team’s Fave Moments
ASHLEY
Hearing a golden-winged warbler in the distance at Grand Mere.
DAVE
Camping with friends.
jessica
The full sensory experience of waking up with the birds just a stone’s throw from the beach.
kaleigh
When the bald eagle swooped down over the trail and landed in its nest nearby.
mitch
Watching the sun come up at Warren Dunes.
Mitch tells the Land Larks’ tale of Birdathon 2025
After a proper winter, our familiar friends – in the form of wildflowers, tree buds, and most importantly BIRDS – had started returning to southwest Michigan, gracing us with their growth and songs. Birdathon is placed right in the center of all this abundance of life, and us nature lovers ate it up! Our familiar team of four – Dave Brown (SWMLC Stewardship Specialist), Ashley Cole-Wick (Michigan Natural Features Inventory, Zoologist), Mitch Lettow (SMWLC Conservation & Stewardship Director), and Kaleigh Winkler (SWMLC Land Protection Director) – welcomed a new first-time member, Jessica Hagen (SWMLC Outreach Coordinator). The five merry members of our band packed into a minivan, cruised around the county bounds . . .
and 113 species are what we found!
Throughout the long day, the Land Larks updated their stats with Instagram and Facebook stories that Kaleigh created on the fly! This is Post #1.
The Land Larks are not afraid to take novel approaches to an old challenge, and trying new things was our Birdathon theme this year. For instance, instead of driving from Kalamazoo at 4 am, we decided to camp out at Warren Dunes State Park so we could just wake up in the heart of Birdathon territory! (Plus, any owls that might wake us in the middle of the night could be added to our list.) Great idea, right? Well, we had a great time camping – despite a complete lack of owls, colder-than-expected temps, and some tree hammock malfunctions that resulted in Ashley falling to the forest floor with a *THUD* (luckily, she was rescued by Dave’s knot-tying skills). 😊
We started our quest at 5 am, just a stone’s throw from our campsite at the Floral Lane entrance into Warren Dunes. Nothing wakes you up and gets the blood flowing like an early morning hike in the dark up a mountain of sand – in rubber boots! Dave and Mitch hooted it up in the dune woods alright, but the owls stayed quiet, unconvinced. Despite our owl language barrier, watching the sunrise over Lake Michigan was well worth the hike all on its own. The angled wall of dune sand and scattered grasses and shrubs caught the emerging light like an amphitheater and the sunrise palette of colors changed every few minutes across the earth-toned bowl in which we stood. We happily picked up at least one low-light bird with the faint but familiar peeeent! of the American Woodcock. By the time we walked back down the dune, we had a respectable start to our day with 30 species.
We decided to stick to the lakeshore and buzzed down to New Buffalo Marina to pick up some finicky shorebirds before the shore-loving humans arrived and scattered them off. With Fish Crow, Caspian and Common Terns, Spotted Sandpiper and a handful of others on our list, we pressed onward and inland.
We landed next to the Galien River at SWMLC’s Berrien County anchor preserve, Kesling Nature Preserve, whose rich forests are always full of birds and reliably bulks up our list. Like watching a chaotic tennis match, our heads and binoculars went back and forth from tree to tree, following the busy flitting of tiny birds feasting on insects after a long night of migrating. Looking down, a bouncy little Louisiana Waterthrush showed itself to us on a log in the river and, looking up, the bobbing tweets of a Yellow-throated warbler descended to our ears from the top of a mighty Sycamore. Jessica added another dozen or so other species to the list, we thanked Kesling for its contributions, and moved on.
Despite what the name might suggest, sewage ponds are a wonderful place for people to see birds! The ponds at Three Oaks did not disappoint and were at the center of a wave of migrants coursing through the area. Hundreds of swallows swirled overhead, dozens of bird calls came out of the treeline along the road, and even the chain link fences had warblers and sparrows darting in and out – we didn’t know which way to turn! We finally looked for the site’s specialty: ducks and shorebirds. Focusing our scope to the east, we saw dozens of little birds dabbing around in the shallows, picking up aquatic invertebrates to fuel their future flights. There was only one problem: the rising sun backlit the already-tiny birds, making them terribly hard to see! With an “oh well,” we nevertheless took our Gadwall, Northern shoveler, and Lesser yellowlegs.
After a pit stop at the New Troy Cemetery, where we watched Red-headed woodpeckers and listened to Pine warblers and a nesting pair of Red-shouldered hawks, we fueled up with homemade venison Reubens “á la” Mitch. As usual the accumulation of new species to our list slowed throughout the day, but we never failed to add at least one wherever we went. This included some new stops for us: Madron Lake (Osprey, Orchard oriole), Andrews University Dairy Farm (Sedge wren, Bank swallow), and Grand Mere State Park.
Grand Mere may have held the greatest surprise at this time of day. The wind had picked up, making it more difficult to hear and the birds to take shelter. Then, we stumbled into a protected backdune slope along South Lake that was alive with birds! While Ashley identifed the buzzy song of the rare Golden-winged warbler on one side of the trail, Kaleigh spotted a Bald eagle nest on the other! Sora, Blackburnian warbler, and White-eyed vireo also flitted onto our lists, giving us an unexpected morale boost.
We ended the day back at Sarett Nature Center’s Brown Sanctuary where we ran into several colleagues from other teams. While we pretend to be competitive, everyone is actually very forthcoming with their bird info – and we even shared spotting scopes, pointing out distant ducks that we would have missed. Though we didn’t break any records, we were pleased as pelicans about the day we had.
We’re also pleased about raising $3,030 for wildflower seed for our oak savanna restoration at Wolf Tree Nature Trails! In total, all Birdathon teams saw 195 bird species in one day, meaning even the top team (who started at 12 am) missed 45 of them! It’s incredible what the community can find when we all set our minds to it.
Most importantly – we sincerely appreciate everyone who pledged or donated in support of the Land Larks and all our work at Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy.
You enabled us to be just a little bit weird about it.
Story by Mitch Lettow | Photos, social media posts, and video by Kaleigh Winkler