Curiosity piques by Vic Fazio's request, I went to eBird and looked at what has been reported in the spring migration season for the period 2003-2007 for Great Egret, to see what the current data looks like. Interestingly, the histograms of the data show that there is a large spike in observations for all the categories around May 8th, with the exception of birds per hour, which has a large spike around the first of April. I immediately associated the date of May 8th as being about the time that large numbers of birders head to the Lake Erie marshes in search of warblers, and of course they would be seeing Great Egrets as well. I have to wonder if the spike in the histograms at May 8th is accurately reflecting when the most Great Egrets are present, or if it's an artifact of when most birders are active. Looking at a map of sightings, it seems that there hasn't been enough data entered to figure out if there are corridors or not - the clusters of sightings away from the lake are near cities, which again introduces the bias of reporting where the most birders are, not where the most birds are present. I generally enter all my birding lists into eBird, so I will be adding some data to this interesting project. I'm going to follow it on eBird as well. It's not that hard to get pretty accurate locations in eBird as well, with the new Google maps feature that lets you put a location on a map or aerial photo. So if you're traveling along a highway and you see some Great Egrets, you can just pay attention to the mile marker or other landmarks, and it's a simple matter to find that location using the mapping tool. Andrew R. Sewell, MS, RPA Principal Investigator Historical/Industrial Archaeology Hardlines Design Company 4608 Indianola Avenue Columbus, Ohio 43214 ph. (614)-784-8733 fax (614)-784-9336 ________________________________ This mailbox protected from junk email by MailFrontier Desktop from MailFrontier, Inc. http://info.mailfrontier.com ______________________________________________________________________ Ohio-birds mailing list, a service of the Ohio Ornithological Society. Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list. Additional discussions can be found in our forums, at www.ohiobirds.org/forum/. 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]