Bill raises some interesting questions. I wonder if the '94 and '03 winter
freeze-ups were as total as this one seems to have been, with many, if not
most,  inland bodies of water frozen throughout the state. I recently
traveled to the UP of Michigan on a family trip and can confirm that the
Great Lakes are frozen almost completely - I saw no open water anywhere
from Houghton in the Keewenaw Peninsula to here in Columbus, although there
must be some here and there. A check of eBird reports for Red-necked Grebe
shows that participants in that web application are reporting the species
mainly along the mid-Atlantic coast in February, with a number in the
Finger Lakes region of New York. Scaup are being seen along the shores of
Lake Michigan and Lake Huron - presumably at power plants, and throughout
the eastern US.

A question I'd like to throw out there is where do the Michigan Trumpeter
Swans go in such conditions? Again, eBird shows an interesting distribution
in Michigan, with a band of sightings across the northern part of the Lower
Peninsula, from Traverse City to Tawas Point, and then another band of
sightings across the lower quarter of the Peninsula. It makes me wonder if
the northern group represents birds moving out of the UP, with the southern
group perhaps a mix of winter-dispersed Michigan and Ohio birds. That of
course raises the issue of whether any Michigan birds are making it to
Ohio...

Andy Sewell
Columbus, Ohio




On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 11:07 AM, Bill Whan <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> Two questions to ponder.  With such a large percentage of Great Lakes
> frozen (up to today, anyhow) we have expected to see larger numbers of
> species that normally winter on these bodies of waters. One example is
> the red-necked grebe. On the two most recent near-total freeze-ups, we
> have seen wondrous numbers of them across the state, in the winters of
> 1984 and 2003: Ohio observers counted 100+ in '94 and 190+ in '03. This
> year we've seen even fewer than usual thus far, countable on one hand.
> Is the frozen-lake theory no longer tenable? If so, what explanation
> might make more sense?
>        I keep reading surprising reports of greater scaups seen this winter
> (and a lot way inland, which is still odder), and fewer of lesser
> scaups. Admittedly, this is a really tough field ID to make under normal
> conditions, but in an average year lessers far outnumber greaters.
> Milton Trautman went on a bit of a rampage about these species back in
> the '30s, asserting that nearly all of the greater scaup species in the
> state's museums had been misidentified by the experts of yore, and
> he--in the OSU museum anyway--replaced them with real greaters he had
> more carefully identified. See
> https://sora.unm.edu/sites/default/files/journals/auk/
> v048n02/p0257-p0258.pdf
>  and
> https://sora.unm.edu/sites/default/files/journals/auk/
> v052n02/p0201-p0202.pdf
>   If I read Trautman's conclusions correctly, only one of 525+ museum
> skins labeled as Ohio greaters actually was correctly identified.  A
> whole roomful of experts missed the IDs of dead scaups on the table, and
> so, I expect, do we, often enough, when we look at them from a distance.
> Or has this unusually cold winter brought unusual numbers of greaters
> this far south?
> Bill Whan
> Columbus
>
>
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