Check out the crowds that showed up to look for Britain's first long-billed murrelet yesterday! http://www.dawlishwarren.co.uk/birdlatest.html Would anything short of a flock of Carolina parakeets cause a turnout like this here? Let's hope at least a few folks with good cameras will be out looking for that possible Arctic loon in Lake Co today. Thanks to John Pogacnik for taking a critical look at it. There is a not altogether satisfactory ID article on the species in the April 1997 Birding. Our Saturday trip to the Lake came up with no species worthy of note, but I did want to mention how spotty the gull flocks were. Fairport Harbor was pretty much gull-free, with less than a hundred Bonaparte's dawdling in the harbor mouth and a few of the larger gulls on the breakwalls. Eastlake PP, on the other hand, was jammed, with perhaps 10 thousand, the majority Bonaparte's in flight, with a good proportion of the rest herring gulls loafing on the water. East 72nd St had some action, but it was mostly ring-billeds and not enough to make us loop back to check them out. Lorain Harbor, however, was wall-to-wall gulls, as it reliably is this time of year. There is great new access to harbor views here. The old taconite piles on the west bank of the river downtown have been gone for some time, but in several places the city has opened the fence that once enclosed that area, enabling access to the end of a pier now under renovation. Check it out. You can pick your way around the potholes and gulls and have a view of the hot waters, and all the harbor lakeward of the marina. Here there were even more gulls than at Eastlake, though ring-billeds predominated. Until the water freezes this spot should have great potential. A large roost of gulls, a few thousand anyway, hangs out on this pier now that it's been cleared. For the birds, it probably represents a poor substitute for the larger roosts we used to see in the big circular dredge spoil impoundment east of the marina. This was also a great shorebird haven in years past, all before a last dollop of dredge spoil was added, changing the hydrology of the site, whereupon Phragmites and smartweed took over. Dredge-spoil reefs and islands have become important refugia for birds continent-wide these days. As humans take over coastal/lakeside areas, some birds are able to adapt to us, nesting on gravel rooftops in shopping centers near water, or on artificial dredge-spoil sites. Can we use dredge spoil in Ohio to provide nesting areas for terns, or even piping plovers? Lou Campbell chronicled the use of such islands near Toledo by up to 5000 pairs of common terns into the 1960s. Wouldn't bringing these birds back be a lot easier if we reconstructed such islands, rather than the current system of encouraging a few birds to nest on floating platforms in diked impoundments? Dredge-spoil impoundments, until they were all filled up and taken over by weeds in recent decades, were rich food sources for migrant birds: veterans will remember spectacular gatherings, especially of shorebirds, at the impoundments near the Oregon Power Plant, or Huron, or Gordon Park, or most recently Lorain. A place like Lorain makes one worry about the effect of contaminants on birds feeding in dredge-spoil disposal sites. The Black River was, and may still be, Ohio's most poisoned river. The Lorain impoundment to my knowledge was not used by the scarcer nesting water or shore birds, but migrants--especially in the fall--sometimes spent up to several weeks fattening up in the impoundment. Is there evidence they suffered from contamination? If not, rehabbing these big weed-clogged lakeside enclosures for spring and fall shorebird foraging and winter roosts of larids would be an attractive idea. Or I suppose we could make them sites for gambling casinos... Bill Whan Columbus ______________________________________________________________________ Ohio-birds mailing list, a service of the Ohio Ornithological Society. Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list. You can join or leave the list, or change your options, at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=OHIO-BIRDS Send questions or comments about the list to: [log in to unmask]