Wisconsin Point is a long sand spit that closes off the western end of Lake Superior at the city of Superior, Wisconsin, opposite Duluth, Minnesota. It is roughly three miles long and broad enough to hold a road, a series of small pull-offs, and a working lighthouse at the eastern tip.
On the third Saturday in November, the wind blew sustained from the northeast at twenty-two knots and the air temperature stood at thirty-three degrees Fahrenheit. A light snow had fallen overnight and the gravel access road was slick.
At 7:42 a.m., the parking area at the lighthouse held eleven vehicles, most with Minnesota plates. The drive from St. Paul is two and a half hours. The drive from Duluth, across the bay, is twenty minutes.
Late-fall lake birding on the Great Lakes is a focused, often miserable discipline. The species sought are passing pelagic and semi-pelagic birds — jaegers, kittiwakes, longspur movements, scoters, occasional alcids — visible only in strong onshore winds and in the right light conditions.
Peder Svingen, who has watched this water from this point since the 1980s, was at the easternmost rocks at 7:55, in heavy bibs, with a Swarovski scope on a tripod and a hand-warmer in each glove.
The first jaeger of the morning was called at 8:14. A sub-adult parasitic jaeger, working east across the bay, chasing a Bonaparte's gull. The bird stooped twice on the gull, lifted, and continued out of view to the northeast.
Svingen called the species with the casual certainty of an observer who has identified perhaps four hundred jaegers from these rocks. Several younger birders in the group made notes and made certain they had it down correctly in their own books.
By 8:38 the second jaeger species had appeared. A pomarine jaeger, distinctive in size and in the heavier chest pattern, moved low over the water roughly three hundred yards out. The bird did not pursue any gull and was logged as a transient.
Two long-tailed jaegers, the third species and the rarest of the morning, were called by Svingen at 9:22 from the same direction. The birds were juveniles, slim and tern-like in flight, working east in the same line as the others.
Three jaeger species in a single ninety-minute window is uncommon, even at Wisconsin Point. Most late-fall lake-watch sessions produce zero jaegers, occasionally one. The Saturday morning was, by Svingen's own assessment, the strongest jaeger morning of the season.
The conditions that produce jaegers on the Great Lakes in late fall are a particular combination of factors. A strong easterly or northeasterly wind, sustained for at least eighteen hours. Substantial gull movement, which the jaegers parasitize. A clean line of sight from the western lake-shore.
Lake Superior's western basin functions as a giant inland reflector for misplaced pelagic species. Birds that should be over the open Atlantic occasionally appear here in late October and November, having followed the Great Lakes corridor inland from the St. Lawrence.
The bird-recording record from Wisconsin Point, maintained by a small group of observers since the 1970s and now uploaded to eBird, includes credible occurrences of dovekie, black-legged kittiwake in good numbers, occasional Sabine's gull, and at least one accepted record of an Atlantic puffin.
Marius Doyle, on the last leg of a North American trip that had taken him to Cape May, Hawk Mountain, and Conowingo, drove from Madison on Friday evening and slept four hours in his car at the lighthouse lot.
He was at the rocks at 7:50 and stayed until 11:15, by which time he had logged not only the three jaegers but a flock of fourteen black scoters working east in single file and a pair of long-tailed ducks settled offshore.
Pell Murphy, who had flown in from Asheville on Thursday for the same weather window, was at the eastern rocks alongside Svingen with his own scope and a clipboard. He had two pairs of gloves on and the inner pair was still cold.
By 10:30 a fresh band of snow began to move in from the lake. Visibility dropped to about four hundred yards. The session, by consensus, was effectively over. Svingen broke down his scope at 10:48 and walked back to his truck.
The drive back along the spit was made slowly. The road was iced in patches. A red fox crossed in front of the truck two hundred yards from the lighthouse and continued without urgency into the pines.
Late-fall lake-watching is, by an order of magnitude, the most physically uncomfortable form of North American birding. The birds are distant. The wind is constant. The cold reaches the bones within an hour. Most participants have done this work for decades.
The reason most participants give, when asked, is the same. The birds that appear here in November are not visible anywhere else in this part of the continent in any other season. The window is short. The cost of presence is low compared to what is on offer.
Doyle's notebook, on Sunday morning at a diner in Two Harbors, held the morning's species list, the wind data, the times of each jaeger, and a single underlined note: three jaeger species in one morning, do not say this lightly.
