Rare bird turns Indiana teacher into birding celebrity

It was Friday morning, and Jeremy Ross needed to head to home to help with the kids.

But Ross, newly initiated into the world of bird watching, couldn't resist a few more minutes looking through his spotting scope.

He'd hoped to spot some of the long-beaked shorebirds that often stop in Indiana during their spring migration to feed in fields along Patoka River National Wildlife Refuge.

He was driving down a bumpy, muddy dirt road near Francisco in Gibson County when he spotted a bird that just didn't look right.

"I got the binoculars out and watched it land," Ross said. "It was real pretty. But with the black and white and orange, I thought, 'That's just not normal. I don't know what this is, but it isn't normal.' "

Ross had spotted a black-tailed godwit, a gull-sized shorebird native to Europe and Asia. Ross' find has made the middle and high school arts teacher a celebrity of sorts among birdwatchers. After all, they might spend a lifetime tallying birds and never find one so rare.

These types of godwits have been spotted along North American coasts, but this sighting is likely the first so far into the U.S. interior, says John Kendall, chairman of the Indiana Bird Records Committee who also edits the birdwatching publication "Indiana Audubon Quarterly."

The black-tailed godwit is certainly the first spotted in Indiana.

"It's a big deal," Kendall said.

The deal is even bigger these days thanks to social media. Ross said he shot a blurry photo of the bird with his cellphone through the peephole on his spotting scope. He posted the image that day to online birding groups.

By the end of the day, the word had gotten out to social-media savvy, die-hard bird watchers. Thanks to online mapping coordinates posted on message boards, birders headed toward Patoka with binoculars and spotting scopes.

One of them was Roger Hedge, a field ecologist with the Department of Natural Resources. Hedge was in Tennessee on a fishing trip with family when he got an alert on his phone about the godwit.

On Easter Sunday, his group took detour through Gibson County on their way home.

It didn't take long to find a group of bird watchers parked along the road, one of whom had a long lens on the godwit as it dabbed in a faraway field with a group of ducks and native shorebirds. Hedge said the bird was worth the trip.

"The color on this bird was fantastic," Hedge said. "It had this pretty bright chestnut or red head and neck and breast. This long, colored bill. It was black on the tip and kind orangish at the base. It's a very distinctive species."

Hedge said one of the birders he met had made the drive straight through from the Milwaukee area.

Heath Hamilton, the Patoka refuge's assistant manager, said Monday that dozens of bird watchers from as far as Ohio, Illinois, Tennessee, Georgia and Louisiana had made the trip.

He's said the godwit has given the 6,600-acre refuge — known locally for its nesting sites for the endangered least tern — national exposure it wouldn't otherwise have gotten.

"These are people who were not coming to visit the refuge," Hamilton said, "if not for this bird."

Ross said that it's been a special experience for him, too. After all, his name is now in the bird-watching record books.

"My parents still can't believe," Ross said, "that people would drive in from Wisconsin for a bird."

Call Star reporter Ryan Sabalow at (317) 444-6179. Follow him on Twitter: @RyanSabalow.