Sleeping Bear Dunes 2014

Five national parks are situated on the shores of the Great Lakes (Pictured Rocks, Apostle Islands, Sleeping Bear Dunes, Indiana Dunes, and Isle Royale), and this week I completed the set with a visit to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.  Only Indiana Dunes is closer to my home, yet this was the last park in the Great Lakes region that I visited.  I was not disappointed.

As a birder, I was targeting two endangered species that can be found reliably in Michigan: Kirtland's Warbler (a life bird) and Piping Plover.  The Kirtland's Warbler depends on vast tracts of young jack pine forests for nesting habitat.  Such habitat was naturally occurring before fire suppression became commonplace, but now 150,000 acres of public land are actively managed for Kirtland's Warblers.  They weigh as much as two quarters and and a penny, but they can sing louder than a gull.  It was such a joy to take one of the Michigan Audubon tours to see this handsome songbird.

The other target bird was Piping Plover, a species which is even rarer than Kirtland's Warbler in the Great  Lakes.  As it turns out, half of the Great Lakes population uses Sleeping Bear Dunes as breeding habitat.  I met a couple of bird monitors at South Manitou Island who were there to count them, but when Joe and I paddled to Gull Point where they are reported to nest on South Manitou, we didn't see any from the water.  The Point is "off limits" to limit disturbance to breeding plovers.  At the mouth of the Platte River on the mainland, however, there was a pair that we saw right away.  Apart from their "piping" calls, they were not easy to track, since Piping Plovers blend in with the beach very well.  Three fluffy chicks had just hatched and were eager to explore the stony beach.

We spent two nights and three days on South Manitou Island, only accessible by ferry.  The mosquitoes were unrelenting, worse than any other place I have been.  It rained every day (which bolstered the blood-sucker population, I presume), but when the sun came out, the scene was glorious. 

One afternoon we hiked to an old growth cedar forest and a perched sand dune.  My second longest day of hiking ever (over 13 miles), it was well worth the effort.  In the ancient forest, we found Small Yellow Ladies Slippers, and in the perched sand dunes, we found an endless carpet of lilies and coreposis.  The trail led us through a beautiful beech-maple forest laced with ferns.  Once we climbed to the dunes, it was like passing from black-and-white to technicolor.

Unpredictable as Lake Michigan can be, we were able to paddle leisurely around half of South Manitou Island, with special views of the foggy mainland, a Bald Eagle, a cormorant rookery, a pair of Mute Swans, and a shipwreck.