A great horned owl took up residence in my giant backyard cottonwood, and has been loudly hooting for the past two nights. I hope it eventually nests there and I can count it in my BBA block! I live in Worthington on a tributary to the Olentangy River.

I spent some time with Ben Warner searching the lakeshore for gulls on Sunday and am happy to report that the gull numbers at the Cleveland lakefront powerplant are definitely up. There were tens of thousands of gulls (primarily ring-billed and herring) and a fair number on Bonapartes (a thousand, perhaps more), but most of them were too far offshore to determine if anything rarer was mixed in. Two lesser black-backeds were much closer to shore and easier to pick out. There were fewer gulls at Eastlake (with only about 100 bonys mixed in), but about fifty thousand red breasted mergansers were floating offshore and an equally impressive amount kept flying by, from west to east along the shore. One common merganser was mixed in. We also saw at least 8 greater black-backeds at that location (none at Cleveland). Hopefully colder conditions will persist and the lake will freeze up and drive the gulls closer to shore. There's nothing like icy winter lake
 birding!

Peregrines stirred things up a bit at both locations, and I saw one at Burke. We couldn't find any snowies at the airport, but Ben spotted some horned larks on the runways.

Ducks. I am sorry to say I didn't take notes on our duck observations. I remember seeing the following species, but may be missing a few (numbers of everything except red breasted mergs were relatively low, less than 50 total at each location): mallard, american black duck, hooded merganser, american goldeneye, scaup (too far away to tell which one), ruddy, bufflehead.

Owls. Searched the pines at the Cleveland lakefront ranger station, but couldn't locate any saw-whets. 

We also spent some time at Headlands (Mentor), but only a handful of ring-billeds and herring were present with a couple common ducks mixed in. If anyone birds there and finds a battered Sibley guide in a beat-up old Zeiss bino case please contact me.  It's probably in the Lake, but I wrote my cell number in the book and am somewhat hopeful a good samaritan will return it (if it's not worthlessly waterlogged).

Good birding to all, and to all a good night!
Heather

Ben- please post corrections if you can think of anything I missed.




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