Hello All,

Very interesting thoughts from Bill.  I've been interested in this question
from the perspective of butterfly (and moth) distributions as we try to
document whether observed changes indicate actual ecological
circumstances or just reflect the intensity of observation.  The documented
Ohio distributions of Lepidoptera species strongly reflects the
distribution of entomologists especially until the mid-20th century.
Cuyahoga, Franklin, Hamilton, Lucas and Montgomery Counties have long lists
mainly because that's where most of the collectors were.  I wonder whether
so many earlier central Ohio bird records simply are because Wheaton,
Trautman, Thomas et al. were from Columbus.  Additionally those pioneers
did most of their birding closer to home.  The Interstate Highway system
has made it easy for a central Ohioan to spend a day birding along Lake
Erie but I recollect Milt Trautman telling me how long it took to drive a
Model T from Columbus to Buckeye Lake on old US 40 (which was paved, and
that was unusual).

Bird on,

Dave Horn
Worcester, MA

On Mon, Oct 3, 2016 at 2:45 PM, Bill Whan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> As I collected first Ohio records for certain species, I noticed that a
> lot of them seemed anomalous, since you'd think they would have been
> recorded first in Lake Erie, rather than central Ohio.
>        King eider 1880, common eider 1885, white-winged scoter 1876, black
> scoter 1876, surf scoter 1917, Eurasian wigeon 1902, cinnamon teal 1895,
> magnificent frigatebird 1880, long-tailed jaeger 1928, Sabine's gull
> 1926, Franklin's gull 1906, black-legged kittiwake 1925.
> All of these species were confirmed first in *central Ohio*, all in
> those years. I've taken most of these records from Peterjohn (2001).
>        If I wanted to find these birds in Ohio, I'd take a trip to the
> Lake,
> as they're too rarely seen in the middle of the state, and likelier up
> north, no? One explanation might be that long ago, when optics were
> primitive, firm ID conclusions could not easily be made of birds way out
> amid winds and heaving water, and in the days when specimens of unique
> species were desired, only birds in the placid waters of mid-state could
> easily be collected or even carefully observed with inadequate optics,
> or killed with a shotgun.
>        One other factor might have been the scarcity of inland waters in
> Ohio
> in the old days. We tend to forget that nearly all the inland lakes
> resulted from human influences fairly recently; Ohio country included no
> large bodies of deep water south of Lake Erie in the old days. One of
> the first artificial lakes was Buckeye Lake, first dammed up around
> 1825, and it was at this reservoir that so many finds of the late 19th
> century were collected.
>        Why were all these species not collected in Lake Erie spots before
> that? Lake Erie is a far more powerful body of water than Buckeye Lake,
> and shooters lucky enough to hit a distant bird found that collecting
> the specimen was even harder. Erie storms may have brought birds closer
> to shore, but braving the waves to retrieve them was a lot harder than
> doing so in a reservoir, which is why we have learned more about birds
> in the old days by studies from collectors at comparatively tame
> reservoirs than in the vast and threatening waters of Lake Erie.
>        That's my explanation. Anybody else got a better one?
> Bill Whan
> Cols
>
>
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