Yesterday morning Darke County Park's 'Early Morning Discovery Hike' was an great experience! The trees seemed to be 'alive' with birds and as you can imagine, this limited the distance covered during our hike! We had a couple 'Fall Firsts': The park's first White-throated Sparrow and Red Breasted Nuthatch. As we wrapped up the walk, there was a HUGE flock of Common Grackles(possibly other blackbirds as well...) across from the parking lot in the woods...anywhere you looked all you could see were black dots! Below is the full list of birds we spotted during the walk. If you are in the Greenville area, check out our next walk on Oct. 16th @ 8am at the Shawnee Prairie Preserve's Nature Center. Location: DCP - Shawnee Prairie Preserve Observation date: 10/2/07 Notes: * Possible Blackpoll Warbler as well...unable to confirm.* Number of species: 29 Killdeer Mourning Dove Chimney Swift <- TONS flying over the south field, and low over the Hill. Red-bellied Woodpecker Yellow-bellied Sapsucker Downy Woodpecker Northern Flicker Eastern Phoebe Blue Jay Carolina Chickadee Tufted Titmouse Red-breasted Nuthatch <- spotted at least one White-breasted Nuthatch Brown Creeper <- First for Fall! Carolina Wren Ruby-crowned Kinglet American Robin European Starling Cedar Waxwing <- Lots checking out the cedar fruit Northern Parula Black-throated Green Warbler Black-and-white Warbler <- Very Cool! Chipping Sparrow White-throated Sparrow <- First for Fall! Northern Cardinal Common Grackle <- HUGE flock!! Brown-headed Cowbird House Finch American Goldfinch This report was generated automatically by eBird v2( http://ebird.org) -- Robb Clifford - Naturalist - Darke County Parks www.darkecountyparks.org "We need another and a wiser, and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken a form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth." -Outermost House by Henry Beston- ______________________________________________________________________ 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]