Birds of the Shoreline — a stop on M-22 South.
Look along the beach and the water as we go, because this shoreline is a migration highway and the cast changes with the season.
Year-round you have gulls — mostly ring-billed, the ones with the black ring round the beak — and they are genuinely wild birds that have simply worked out that people carry food. Terns fish the shallows, hovering and then folding up into a dive.
On the water, look for cormorants: black, low in the water, neck like a periscope, and they sit on breakwaters with their wings held out to dry because their feathers are deliberately not fully waterproof — it makes them less buoyant and better divers.
In migration, this shore funnels enormous numbers of birds. They do not like crossing big open water, so they follow the coastline, and in spring and autumn the beaches and dune edges fill up with warblers, shorebirds and raptors moving through.
Bald eagles are common now and worth pausing on — in the nineteen sixties DDT had thinned their eggshells so badly that the Great Lakes population nearly collapsed. They came back after the ban. Look for them perched on dead trees along the shore and over the river mouths.
And in the dune grass, the small pale piping plover I mentioned — the one the roped-off areas are for.