Freighter View Farms | Chris Izworski

One of the things you don’t expect when you move to the Great Lakes shoreline is how much the birds change everything. The bay outside Freighter View Farms is on the western shore of Lake Huron, in the lower portion of Saginaw Bay. It’s a significant staging area for migrating waterfowl and shorebirds, and it’s a year-round habitat for species that don’t exist inland.

I’m not a birder in the technical sense — I don’t keep a life list, I don’t chase rarities. But I pay attention to what’s happening on the water and the shore, and after years here, the seasonal rhythm of the birds has become as familiar as the garden calendar.

Spring: The North-Moving Push

By late March, the bay is already moving. Common Mergansers are paired up and feeding in the shallows. Horned Grebes appear in loose groups offshore, still in their remarkable breeding plumage — chestnut neck, golden ear tufts, red eyes. They’re on their way to northern Canada and will be gone by mid-May.

April is warbler month along the lakeshore. The corridor effect that makes the Great Lakes so productive for migrants works in both directions — birds funnel south in fall and north in spring, concentrating at peninsulas, headlands, and bay edges where they rest before crossing open water. The scrubby thicket behind the garden reliably holds Yellow Warblers, Common Yellowthroats, and American Redstarts through May.

Shorebird migration peaks in mid-May: Dunlins, Semipalmated Sandpipers, and Least Sandpipers work the wet edges of the bay. The bay’s shallow, productive wetland margins make it a legitimate stopover site on the Mississippi and Atlantic flyways.

Summer: Breeders and Residents

By June the migrants are through and the summer residents settle in. Barn Swallows nest in the outbuildings. Tree Swallows compete for the nest boxes I put up along the fence line. Great Blue Herons fish the shoreline daily — patient, stationary, perfect.

Double-crested Cormorants are the most conspicuous summer presence. They roost in large numbers on the breakwater structure offshore and fish in cooperative groups in the shallower portions of the bay. Watching them work — diving, surfacing, diving again in loose coordination — is one of the reliable pleasures of a summer morning here.

Osprey became regular by 2019 and are now a daily sight in warm months. The pair that nests on the navigation structure at the river mouth hunts the bay systematically, hitting the same productive zones at predictable times.

Fall: The Big Show

Fall migration on the Great Lakes is something else entirely. The concentration effect that produces modest spring numbers produces enormous fall aggregations. By late September the bay is hosting thousands of Ring-billed and Herring Gulls, mixed with Lesser Black-backed and occasional Iceland Gulls working through from the breeding grounds.

The Bonaparte’s Gull concentration in October is the event I look forward to most. In peak years, tens of thousands of Bonaparte’s Gulls stage on the outer bay — a tern-like, buoyant, elegant gull on its way from Canadian breeding grounds to Gulf of Mexico wintering areas. They appear suddenly, work the bay for a few days, and vanish. The timing and size of the concentration varies year to year with wind and weather.

Late October and November bring diving ducks: Scaup by the thousands, Canvasbacks, Redheads, Buffleheads, Goldeneyes. The bay in November holds more ducks than I’ve seen anywhere else I’ve lived.

Winter: What Stays

A significant portion of the bay stays open through most winters — the moving water of the Saginaw River keeps a channel clear, and the shallower western portions are the last to freeze. Common Mergansers, Goldeneyes, and Buffleheads winter on the open water. Bald Eagles hunt the shoreline and roost in the large cottonwoods along the river.

Snowy Owls appear in irruption years — roughly every three to five years, driven by lemming population crashes in the Arctic tundra. In the winter of 2021-22 I counted seven from one observation point. In most years there are none.

The Broader Context

The Great Lakes basin is one of North America’s most important avian resources — not just for shorebirds and waterfowl, but for landbirds using the lakeshore as a navigation corridor. For data on migration routes, species lists, and key hotspots along the Lake Huron western shore, the Great Lakes birding reference at chrisizworski.com is a useful starting point.

For habitat and ecosystem context on the bay itself — fish species, water quality, wetland coverage, and wildlife data — the Saginaw Bay ecology reference compiles the core data in one place. And for more posts from the bay and the garden, Freighter View Farms is where I write about all of it.

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Photography by Chris Izworski — Freighter View Farms, Saginaw Bay, Bay City, Michigan.