Yesterday (July 11) Tim & I went to Tri-Valley WA for a couple of hours. In the pond on the east side of Madison-Hall Rd, just north of the tank where the Blue Grosbeak is found, we saw 5 birds swimming that are giving us serious identification problems, not because we couldn't identify them but because what we identified absolutely should not be here at this time of year. I will describe them just as I did in the sketch & notes I took, without naming what I think they are just yet. The birds had a roundish, "football" type body that rode very low in the water & it looked like the tail was almost non-existant. They had a slightly long neck and the head was very flat on top. The bill was the most distinguishable characteristic : it was somewhat long & very thin & pointed. The body color was actually the hardest thing to determine. The back, neck, & most of the head was an almost uniform brownish-grey, with the very top of the head being darker than the rest. The throats & necks of all 5 birds were whitish but varied somewhat in just how white they were. Some were very white, others less so, almost a buffy color. We were tooar away to determine just how far up onto the face/cheek the white extended. They would often "stand up" in the water & spread their wings & we could see the bellies were very white & they had large white speculems. They most certainly looked like grebes to us. Everything about the shape of the body, head & bill said grebe. But not Pied-bill---the bills were just too thin & pointed. The bill shape did suggest the possibility of a merganser but the body shape did not. And we definitely did not see anything that even remotely resembled a crested head. We watched the birds for a period of about 30 minutes, through the scope. I took notes & made a very rudimentary sketch but, idiots that we are, we never thought to try to get a picture. We left thinking they must be immature either Horned or Eared Grebes, leaning slightly towards Horned only because we could not detect a "peak" on the head, but again, we were probably too far away to tell that for sure. We also considered the possibility of eclipsed plumage grebes, but if they were in eclipse, they shouldn't be able to fly & we thought they must be on an extremely early migration. I know that the likely-hood of either of these birds being here at this time of year is about impossible. I called Jim McCormak to get his thoughts on this & he confirmed that neither Horned or Eared Grebes should be here but he did say that Eared Grebes nest in nw Illinois so would possibly be the more likely of the two. After talking to Jim, we did go back to try to get some pictures but they had left the pond. Does anyone else have any thoughts on what we saw or the possibility of either of these grebes being in Ohio in mid July? Laura Dornan Louisville, Stark County ************************************** Get a sneak peak of the all-new AOL at http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour ______________________________________________________________________ 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]