LandNotes

Barn swallows - Photo: Mila Zinkova / Wikipedia Commons

I do not tweet on Twitter, but I do know something about our feathered tweeting friends. My first piece of published writing was a slim and self-conscious essay about birdwatching, and the day after it appeared in a San Francisco newspaper, a publisher phoned me to ask if I wanted to contribute to a book about birds. So while I don’t spend a lot of time afield with binoculars these days, I understand this particular urge to touch nature.

Still it came as a surprise to discover that The Cleveland Plain Dealer publishes a weekly column on birding in northeast Ohio. Its author, James F. McCarty, covers the local port authority and general news, and once a week he writes about the birds. It tickles me that a major metro newspaper would devote space to birding.

His topic last Tuesday: good birding at former golf courses, specifically the recently closed Oakwood Club in Cleveland Heights—the focus of a TPL conservation effort.

The club is combining memberships with the Mayfield Sand Ridge Club, and the property is for sale. Area residents have banded together in an attempt to preserve the 144-acre golf course as an oasis in a sea of suburban development for generations to enjoy.

The Oakwood property possesses unlimited potential as a park . . . . The place is teeming with birds. . . . The first things you notice at Oakwood are the barn swallows — hundreds of them coursing over the tees and down the fairways. So many, in fact, that they left me wondering how golfers at the club could have played 18 holes without winging a few during the round.

The swallows were joined in their flycatching pursuits by Eastern wood-pewees, Eastern phoebes and chimney swifts.

Before closing the column, McCarty also endorses the birding at Liberty Park in nearby Twinsburg, to which TPL recently added 52 acres.

My son Bret and I hiked the park’s Meadow Trail on Sunday, and found fields bursting with birdlife. At least three Henslow’s sparrows were singing from goldenrod perches. About 20 bobolinks in their fall yellow-and-brown plumages were flocking in preparation for departure to South America for the winter. Also there: Eastern meadowlarks, song sparrows, indigo buntings, house wrens, and a colorful array of butterflies and dragonflies.

The more I read from and about northeast Ohio, the more I think that it must be a great place to live. You can read more about TPL’s work there in the Ohio pages of our website.