The Counted Birds, and the Nests That Are Not on This Ground

The county record, 2015 to the present

The county's celebrated modern bird record — the eagles' return, the ospreys' concentration — is real, documented, and not Mishawaka's, and this entry exists to keep the boundary where the record puts it. The University of Notre Dame's statement governs the eagle geography: the pairs at ND-LEEF in St. Patrick's County Park and at Potato Creek State Park "were the first successful bald eagle nests ever recorded in St. Joseph County," both in the spring of 2015 — one on the river north of South Bend, one in the county's southwest. The osprey map of the same season is the same shape: four nesting pairs at Potato Creek — in the DNR's words, "the highest concentration of any area in Indiana" — one at St. Patrick's, one along the river behind Saint Mary's College. Every one of those nests stands on South Bend-side or western-county ground. What systematic instrument does cover this ground is the Christmas Bird Count: the South Bend circle, code INSB in the National Audubon Society's count, is centered at Washington and Michigan Streets in downtown South Bend and takes in the standard fifteen-mile-diameter circle — a geometry that reaches across Mishawaka, the city's center standing some five miles from the circle's center and only its far eastern fringe near the rim. Mishawaka's winter birds are therefore counted, every December, inside a South Bend-named circle by the South Bend-Elkhart Audubon Society's counters, and no separate Mishawaka count exists. The full prints — the ND-LEEF nest's sixteen eaglets in eleven years, the falcons downtown, the count's history and its named gap — stand in South Bend's file; what stands here is the boundary, drawn where the nests are.

Principal sources

1. University of Notre Dame, Environmental Change Initiative and ND News (2015–2018), and Indiana DNR release, 8 May 2015 — the county's first successful eagle nests (ND-LEEF and Potato Creek); the four osprey pairs at Potato Creek, "the highest concentration of any area in Indiana"; the St. Patrick's and Saint Mary's osprey nests — all as printed whole in South Bend's file.
2. National Audubon Society, Christmas Bird Count — circle INSB, center at Washington and Michigan Streets, South Bend; the South Bend-Elkhart Audubon Society's count material.