I looked at my schedule and realized that I had the time to make a run up to Lake Michigan on Tuesday so I start to put a quick trip together. At 5:45am on Tuesday, my friends Ted Meyer and John Sumner picked me up and we headed up to Logansport to pick up a young birder named Landon Neumann. We finally arrived at the Hammond Marina at 9:30 and immediately headed out on the rocky edge around the Stateline Power Plant. It was quickly evident that there were hundreds if not thousands of waterfowl and hundreds of gulls.
We quickly picked up most of the common lakefront species and then went to work on scanning all the gulls for any sign of the Slaty-backed. As we scanned, some of the waterfowl moved in pretty close and I took a break from scanning to snap some pictures. The main highlight was an adult male White-winged Scoter that suddenly appeared only a few yards from where we were standing.

When I was finished shooting, I went back to scanning. There were tons of gulls but we could not find our main target. Some of the other gulls present were, Glaucous, Herring, Ring-billed, Great Black-backed, Thayer's, and a very cooperative Black-legged Kittiwake.
Black-legged Kittiwake
We were starting to run out of time so we made the decision to move on to one other location to look for our target. We were just about to our next destination when my phone rang. It was lakefront birder John Kendall and he had just gotten word that they Slaty-backed had been located just a few hundred yards from where we had been looking for it from all morning! We hurried back and practically ran down the pier to find the Slaty-backed Gull. As we caught up to the group, everyone had the bird in their scopes and we were quickly able to locate it in ours as well. Although it was far away, we still got great looks. It was a great test for my new Vortex Razor scope that I got for Christmas!
We all enjoyed the bird for about 10 minutes but then we had to start heading home. It was a wonderful day to be in the field and we all had a lot of fun!