Day 43. July 03, 2014. Thursday. Cheticamp Campground, Cape Breton Highlands National Park, Nova Scotia

When traveling at your whim without a schedule and seemingly without a time limit, it can be funny how things work out.

After birding a bit around the campground, we stopped at the visitor center to use the wifi. It didn't work and we were annoyed, but we asked for some information that the staff needed to run upstairs to find. Still annoyed, I looked over a rack of advertizing brochures about everything to do, where to eat, etc. (that is: everywhere to spend your money) in the area. At the bottom of the rack, a brochure on the recovery program for the super-rare Bicknell's Thrush caught my eye (at least there was one thing that I might want to read while waiting for the ranger to come back). Scanning through the brochure -- holy smokes: they do annual surveys for Bicknell's Thrushes right here on the Benjie Lake Trail! We had thought about walking the trail yesterday, but ran out of time and skipped it. We ran out of time because it was across the road from the fen-bog, and the bog was too cool to leave.

Long story short, we drove back to the Benjie Lake Trail, walked about 200 yards up the trail, and started hearing 2-3 Bicknell's Thrushes (LB#635; heard only) singing back in the woods! We walked the rest of the 1-mile trail to the lake and saw two pairs of Mourning Warblers and lots of moose scat and tracks, but never actually saw the thrushes.

We wanted to walk back in the woods for a closer look, but the woods here are so thick and so wet that off-trail travel would be really difficult. In fact, through the thrush habitat area, the Benjie Lake Trail is built up even if it just looks like gravel. Below the gravel, the trail is underlain by old military aircraft landing-strip material (Marsden Matting), the kind people sometimes use to drive across sand in the desert. That partially explains why the trail is so straight in this area.

We then went back across the road for another nice, long tour of the fen-bog, we relaxed in the shade for a couple of hours waiting for the Bicknell's Thrushes to start their evening songs. In addition to other things, we used the time to figure a tentative schedule for getting home on time.

Towards sunset, we walked back down the Benjie Lake Trail and heard the thrushes again, but this time the wind was down and we could hear them much better -- it was worth the wait to be sure that we were hearing the right birds. We also saw a very pretty male Magnolia Warbler.

Straggling in after dark, we turned 7,000 miles on the trip as we returned to Cheticamp Campground for a second night.

Note: All distances, elevations, and other facts are approximate.
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