The Niagara Escarpment really is underrated
Plus, thoughts on birding, ornithology, and elitism.
Most people don’t set out to visit the Niagara Escarpment, but there’s a good chance that you know of its treasures.
As Troy McClure used to say on “The Simpsons,” you may remember the escarpment from such wonders as Wisconsin’s Door County, Ontario’s Bruce Peninsula, and the Niagara Falls. It’s a 650-mile spine of Silurian dolomite that’s stood the test of glaciers and eons of weathering.
The escarpment runs from northeast Wisconsin through the Door Peninsula, the narrow land mass that juts out from the rest of Wisconsin in the east. It makes up a string of islands in Lake Michigan and then stretches to the rocky beaches of Michigan’s Garden Peninsula and points eastward to Manitoulin Island, Ontario. From there, it’s south and east through Ontario’s Bruce Peninsula and across central Ontario to the Niagara region all the way to Rochester, NY.
Now, what does this all have to do with birding? Everything, of course. The escarpment encompasses some incredible habitat and umpteen acres of forests, lakes, meadows, and wetlands. Birds are finding what they need in oh-so-many areas along the escarpment. Just consider the explosion of American White Pelicans in Lake Michigan’s Green Bay, a body of water hemmed in by the escarpment on the east. Or the rare Black Tern that inhabits estuaries and marshes throughout the region.
Canada appears to celebrate the escarpment moreso than the United States. The popular Bruce Hiking Trail follows the escarpment for nearly 500 miles across Ontario, from Tobermory to the Toronto suburbs and the Niagara region. It’s a geography that is home to cold, snowy winters and warm summers and breezes that make the conditions just right for growing grapes for wine.
Some landforms just don’t get the attention they deserve. In Door County, Wisconsin, anyone who’s been to Peninsula State Park would recall the rugged cliffs on the edge of Lake Michigan—that’s the Niagara Escarpment. But one could do worse than spend time exploring every nook and cranny of this rim of rock through the center of the continent.
Separating birders from ornithologists is more than splitting hairs
I was struck by a piece last week by Ryan Mandelbaum who wrote on his
Substack a review of Kenn Kaufman’s latest book, “The Birds That Audubon Missed.”Mandelbaum centers in on a key distinction, that between amateur birders and trained ornithologists. To the untrained eye, there could appear to be quite a bit of overlap—and there is during field trips, festivals, volunteer projects, and certain other settings. But there’s often a rather large chasm between the two groups, too. Start with the fact that ornithologists are typically in the industry as a vocation, whereas birders are in it as an avocation. This holds for many other fields. Just think of golf. One of us might play our local nine-hole course on the weekend, but that is nowhere near the level of seriousness and purpose that someone on a professional tour possesses. Even a teaching pro or a club professional would look at golf in quite a different way than a weekend duffer.
Further, trained ornithologists are just that—trained. They’ve invested inordinate time, energy, and money into their education. There may not be a parallel for the amateur birder, short of spending time looking for birds, poring through field guides, or serving as a citizen science volunteer.
John James Audubon embodied this, too, just not in the way one might expect. Audubon himself was a painter and writer, rather than a scientist. He was mostly excluded from elite scientist circles when he pitched his work in Philadelphia, the nation’s hub of science at the time. He was an outsider, and it would be decades before his work was popularized and even then it wasn’t through traditional scientific circles.
Mandelbaum points out the paradox of Audubon being an outsider while in the broader sense also being an insider culturally and societally. He takes this a step further by noting that in the present-day “[birding] is still largely inaccessible to, and in some cases actively excludes, the same folks traditionally left out of establishment science, especially Black and indigenous people of color.”
This is true and birding and science more broadly needs continued focus on engaging non-traditional audiences. The only thing I’d add is there’s a bigger problem of elitism in birding that needs to be addressed simultaneously. That elitism excludes all sorts of people who quickly conclude “birding isn’t for them” or “I’m not good enough” after some initial birding experiences. I hate to generalize, but I will as someone who’s done this their whole life—many, many birders are terribly unwelcoming to newcomers, especially women. Many who try to be welcoming are so awkward socially that they come across as unwelcoming know-it-alls. This thread has been present as long as I’ve been birding. That’s why I applaud groups like the Feminist Bird Club and others who emphasize inclusiveness over competitiveness and tallying the most birds. It’s an attempt to create a birding world that engages a wider set of people and especially those typically considered outsiders.
Please be seated
Whit.
That’s the call of the Swainson’s Thrush, heard frequently in these parts in September. It’s a reminder that the Illinois Big Sit is coming up again. If you don’t know what a Big Sit is, it’s when birders sit or stand in a 17-foot circle and identify as many species as possible during a specific time period. Last year, I shared my backyard big sit in this space (25 species!). This year I have some different plans, and we’ll see how they pan out.
The Illinois Ornithological Society (IOS) organizes this event that takes place among individuals and teams Friday, September 20, through Sunday, September 22. Most anyone can participate from most anywhere in this grand tradition of birding, and teams can raise funds for IOS in the process.
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The Escarpment, as you noted, provides excellent birding - the mostly contiguous green pathway taking in one of the narrowest crossings of the Great Lakes up to northern forests (and the reverse in fall migration.) Not just songbirds: the raptor migration is also notable (hundreds of turkey vultures kettling over Kelso and Rattlesnake Point in s. Ontario is quite a sight!) and it's credited as the route of return for ravens into southern Ontario. (Also the occasional wandering black bear.) Touching on another point you made, I've been birding for nearly 50 years, and was lucky enough to be among a group of birders at the beginning who didn't show any misogyny - although I've encountered it in other settings (and still do, although now it's hard to separate from ageism.) But I've never had much use for the birders who are only out for the numbers; for me birding has always been part of understanding an ecosystem, a reason to be out observing and learning, not ticking off species.
There is an excellent Nature documentary on the Escarpment focusing on Niagara Falls: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/about-niagara-falls/28649/
I didn't realize it went all the way to Door County!