Lots of good birds yesterday at Killdeer Plains.  Instead of adding a list
for all the different places I went today, I combined all of them into
one.  Any and all ducks were mostly in pond one along the Marion/Wyandot
border (Pond 27...or Pond 1 depending on your map). Grebes were
everywhere.  Yellow-rumps were as well.  Sparrows were all along the way.
Shorebirds were in every shallow watering hole.  N. Pintails and W. Snipe
were the birds of the day for me.  List of birds are at the end of the
email.

IF you are a member of the Birding Ohio Facebook page, you already know
about this part.  For the non-Facebookers, I have created a game using
eBird data...It is meant to be a game for advanced High School Students at
my local High School.
I have a Top 100 Scavenger Hunt for every month from October 2014 to
December of 2015...a calender if you will. Birds are listed in Taxonomical
order. Rankings are determined from the last ten complete years(2004-2013)
of the frequency histogram data (Bar Charts) for Ohio on eBird:
http://bit.ly/1s8M7zR. Each month's data is then averaged. The averaged
numbers are then sorted highest to lowest and the top 100 are then put back
into Taxonomical order. 50 is pretty easy to get, all 100 will require at
least a trip to the northern half...or the southern half of the state
almost every month...darn Chickadees anyways..:-D .  I like seeing how some
birds move up and down the list, meaning that every month is different.
Because of the way the data is compiled, rare birds are pushed out of the
list. Birds that are considered introduced or invasive are excluded.

 I have been looking for a way to share it with the rest of the Ohio
birding community.  The best thing I could come up with is to turn it into
a PDF, and adding it to my dropbox acct.  SO if you would like to play
along...:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3220c8dw2w6czwu/Ohio%20Scavenger%20Hunt%202014-2015.pdf?dl=0

Birds from yesterday:

Canada Goose
Trumpeter Swan
Wood Duck
Gadwall
American Wigeon
American Black Duck
Mallard
Blue-winged Teal
Northern Pintail
Pied-billed Grebe
Great Blue Heron
Turkey Vulture
Bald Eagle
Red-tailed Hawk
American Coot
Killdeer
Lesser Yellowlegs
Pectoral Sandpiper
Semipalmated Sandpiper
Wilson's Snipe
Ring-billed Gull
Mourning Dove
Belted Kingfisher
Red-headed Woodpecker
Downy Woodpecker
Northern Flicker
American Kestrel
Blue Jay
American Crow
Carolina Chickadee
Ruby-crowned Kinglet
Eastern Bluebird
European Starling
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Field Sparrow
Song Sparrow
Swamp Sparrow
White-throated Sparrow
White-crowned Sparrow
Dark-eyed Junco
Northern Cardinal
Red-winged Blackbird
Eastern Meadowlark
Common Grackle
American Goldfinch

Happy Birding and God Bless!

Steve J.

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