Early this morning I looked through a cloud of 60 to 70 goldfinches (plus two Pine Siskins) fussing over perch-space on my four tube feeders, and behind them, in the distance, the local cell tower was hosting thirteen Black Vultures on roost. The last bird left the tower at 7:36 AM this morning. Backstory: Vultures have used the new tower (built maybe five years ago) intermittently through the autumn this year, but only in two's and three's until now. If previous years' patterns prevail, numbers of roosting birds will increase rapidly during the coming weeks and will fill all available perches--about fifty birds can find space on the tower. I've observed as many as 80 birds buzzing the tower looking for a perch at one time (two years ago). Last winter, early on, the roost moved, every last bird, a couple miles west onto a large electricity transmission tower in Paint Creek Valley (US Route 50 west of Chillicothe), before it grew so large. The transmission tower holds many more birds, and the Black Vulture population is growing annually. I have a Black Vulture nest in the Ohio Breeding Bird Atlas II block that includes this tower (I had none in the area during the first Atlas). Peterjohn (The Birds of Ohio, 2001) suggests Black Vultures have been increasing in Ohio through the 1990's. I'm sure they continue to increase in the 21st Century. Black Vultures are a southern species near the northern limits of their mid-western range in Ohio. A Harbinger of global warming? Have fun with using Christmas Bird Count data to make a long-term graph of Black Vulture Population growth here: http://audubon2.org/cbchist/table.html Tom Bain The Glaciated Allegheny Plateau Ross County ______________________________________________________________________ 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]