Hi Everyone

Beth and I joined the Kirtland Bird Club outing at East 72nd Street  
on the Lake Eerie shore this morning—we got there about 8 AM and  
stayed for a couple of hours. Conditions were very good—about 20  
degrees F, winds of maybe 10 mph off the lake, the surface all iced  
in except for a nice pool of open water (it did start snowing pretty  
heavily just before we left). There were over a dozen other people  
there as well.

But two things were missing: first, where were the expected thousands  
of dead and dying gill shad? And then, maybe because the gill shad  
weren’t there, the gull numbers were much smaller than we had hoped— 
instead of the tens of thousands that we sometimes see at this time  
of year (and that we saw from the Jan 2 boat trip), there were  
perhaps a couple thousand gulls around the open pool.

Here’s what we saw:

Mallard
American Black Duck
Common Goldeneye
Bufflehead
Redhead
Canvasback
Red-breasted Merganser
Hooded Merganser
Lesser Scaup
(other people had Gadwall, but we didn’t see them)
Ring-billed Gull
Herring Gull
Great Black-backed Gull (really good numbers of both adults and 1st  
and 2nd year birds)
Lesser Black-backed Gull (a couple)
Glaucous Gull (1!)
Canada Goose
Double-crested Cormorant (1)
Rock Pigeon

Best wishes,

Steve Cagan
Cleveland Heights, Cuyahoga County


Steve Cagan, photographer

[log in to unmask]
www.stevecagan.com
www.pbase.com/stevecagan
216-932-2753 (USA)




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