For Fantastic Seabird Spotting, Head to ... the Great Lakes?

The Holiday, a handsome 65-foot charter boat, spends much of its time ferrying Cleveland Browns fans up the Cuyahoga River from the city’s Flats neighborhood to home games at Huntington Bank Field. On other days, the vessel might be engaged for a birthday party, wedding, or fishing trip.

In 2009, the boat added one more role to its resumé: mobile birding platform. When a local tour leader suggested that members of northwest Ohio’s Black Swamp Bird Observatory could gather on the Holiday for some winter birding on Lake Erie, director Kimberly Kaufman was taken aback. For one, Cleveland’s average temperature in December hangs around 35 degrees. And besides, this is Ohio, not coastal California or Maine.

“No one had ever heard of doing a lake pelagic,” she says. “It was really an innovative idea.” When birders hear pelagic trip, after all, they generally think ocean. The excursions are known for offering the chance to see seabirds like albatrosses and shearwaters that are rarely found near shore. But Black Swamp’s experiment was a success, the tradition stuck, and observatory members and others now bundle up and board the boat multiple times each winter.

Kaufman and company aren’t the only ones getting in on the fun: Pelagic birding trips are gaining a foothold around the Great Lakes. Demand across the region is apparent—at Chicago’s first annual Urban Birding Festival, held in late September, a Lake Michigan outing “filled up almost immediately,” says trip co-leader and gull expert Amar Ayyash.

Though the Midwest can’t always match the numbers or variety of seabirds that ocean pelagics provide, it still offers an exciting breadth of possible encounters. “A lot of these are just fascinating birds,” says Audubon Great Lakes conservation manager Tom Prestby. Some nest in the Arctic, he says, “so we don’t see them a lot.”

Along with year-round Great Lakes regulars like Herring Gulls and Ring-billed Gulls, inland pelagic birders might encounter Black Terns, Arctic Terns, and White-winged Scoters. All three species of jaeger also show up on the lakes, a particularly entertaining find because they’re rarely spotted over land—and “they’re pirates,” Ayyash says. “They basically chase gulls and terns and harass them until they give up whatever they’re feeding on.”

Pelagic trips can offer more than entertainment, Ayyash says: Since there are few eBird checklists for offshore areas, observations from these outings can provide valuable information about bird abundance and movement. For example, Ayyash and others on that September cruise had seven Sabine’s Gulls gathered around their boat—a surprisingly large group for the area. Ayyash now suspects more of the striking black-and-white Arctic breeders make Lake Michigan part of their annual migration journey south than have generally been recognized. “It’s too random that this pelagic that we did out of Illinois would spot this many birds,” he says. “This is unprecedented.”

Pelagic birders often use a tried-and-true technique to bring seabirds into view: chumming the water.

Ohio’s pelagic participants have also contributed their fair share of useful findings on Lake Erie, Kaufman says. Observations from the Holiday have helped to document which birds are using the waters near Cleveland, “and that has implications for offshore wind development,” she says. "So there’s a conservation implication to these trips as well.”

Years of Black Swamp’s trips have also introduced many a passenger to new species, Kaufman says—sometimes before they get far from shore. Elusive Snowy Owls can sometimes be spotted foraging around Cleveland’s waterfront, Peregrine Falcons hunt along the banks of the Cuyahoga, and nimble Purple Sandpipers flit among the rocky outcrops and piers. Farther out on the lake, participants have identified Glaucous Gulls and Red-throated Loons. “Showing someone else a bird they’ve never seen—that never gets old,” Kaufman says.

Pelagic birders often use a tried-and-true technique to bring crowd-pleasing seabirds into view: chumming the water. Curiosity may compel seabirds to investigate a boat in their territory, but keeping them close enough to observe and photograph often requires appealing to their appetites, Ayyash says. That can include selections from the fragrant menu of popcorn, fish guts, and cat food.

“Just about any species will come and check out the feeding to see what they’re missing,” says birder Donald Estep, speaking to Audubon from his 29-foot Rinker cruiser, the Nauti-Gull. “It’s FOMO.”

Estep, who embarks from his home port in New Buffalo, Michigan, says he prefers to go into his excursions with an open mind, which means rarely planning routes in much detail or seeking particular species. On one occasion, he was surprised to briefly host a couple of Palm Warblers on the boat. “They landed on the windshield and started eating bugs,” he says.

For Midwesterners interested in joining a pelagic trip, it’s often worth checking with area groups on social media like Facebook and Discord, or with a local birding organization, since not all trips are shared widely online. Boats for Great Lakes tours tend to be smaller than those used on the ocean, so a trip’s capacity may be smaller.

Once you’ve booked an outing, preparation is key. Queasier birders might consider taking Dramamine ahead of boarding the boat. (Though Lake Erie can get choppy, bird outings on the Holiday have an unbroken no-puking streak, Kaufman says: “I should knock on wood.”) Since trips can take up the better part of a day, packing snacks never hurts, as long as the smell of fish guts doesn’t tank your appetite.

Weather is a major factor, particularly in winter. “It’s going to be colder and breezier out there than you expect,” says Greg Neise, a webmaster for the American Birding Association who’s embarked on trips in Illinois and Michigan. It’s not unusual for temperatures to drop anywhere from 10 to 15 degrees out on the open water. Layers are an easy way to adapt.

Keeping an eye on the forecast has another key function: It can hint at the most likely places to find good birds. “Those cold fronts in fall that have northwest or northeast winds behind them really bring the birds down,” Prestby explains. “Here in Wisconsin, we want winds to blow birds over Lake Michigan toward the shore, so I get out there when there’s a northeast wind.”

Whichever way the wind blows, spending a day in community with birders is a treat of its own, Kaufman says, especially if there are young people aboard. “Their eyes and ears are so sharp, and they’re just so enthusiastic.”

During one of the first Black Swamp outings, Kaufman says, on a particularly cold January day, a member of the Ohio Young Birders Club was standing on the Holiday’s bow when a mammoth wave crashed over him. The water instantly froze on his parka, rendering him a giant icicle.

“He turns around and looks at me,” she says, “and he’s just got this huge smile on his face, like, ‘This is the best thing!’”