Returning to the city of my birth for a weekend visit, I decided to check out the Cleveland Lakefront Nature Preserve and do a bit of birding. It was a great choice.
As luck would have it on this beautiful, sunny Saturday morning, the park was full of birds. I had barely walked out of the parking lot when I heard yellow warblers and immediately spotted two of them in a nearby tree.
The park is a small peninsula jutting out into Lake Erie a few miles east of downtown Cleveland. The park was built on sediment dredged from the lake in a spot near two old freighters that were junked offshore to serve as a wave break. We passed those old freighters many times when I was a kid, watching them slowly recede below the water over the years.
The park has a loop trail just under 3 miles long that traces the perimeter along the lake. I walked about half of it, going counterclockwise from the trailhead. Just under a mile out, I reached a good spot to take a few photos of downtown, then cut over on the Monarch Trail to save some time and steps.
The path almost all of the way was flat and easy to travel, most of it with grass and clover underfoot and gravel in a few sections. Posts every tenth of a mile let you know where you were in relation to the overall trail system, and I appreciated the benches that were placed at many of the markers. Several faced the lake, on which I only spotted a few gulls and Canada geese plus a pair of mallards.
But the trees and gullies along the trails were teeming with birds. I also saw a couple of squirrels and two deer.
Cleveland was sarcastically called “the mistake on the lake” for many years from the late 1960s onward, a reputation it received for urban decay and an environmental atmosphere so lousy that the polluted Cuyahoga River caught fire several times.
Cleveland has done a great job turning things around in many ways, and I was greatly impressed by the preserve — which I hope helps restore my hometown to the slogan used in the 1970s to counter its poor reputation: “the best things in life are here.”
The Jersey Birder 
My wife and I were visiting our daughter and son-in-law in Oberlin, Ohio for two days. We stayed at an Airbnb in Cleveland. After checking the Cleveland Audubon website, I planned two early morning photograph trips for the Cleveland Lakefront Nature Preserve, hoping to find birds on the waterfront. But it rained heavily on both days.
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That’s disappointing, but I have a hunch you’ll be back there sometime!
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