The National Weather Service has issued ominous predictions for the weather tomorrow, Sunday December 16, in northwestern Ohio. The forecast calls for 6 to 12 inches of snow, with winds on Sunday picking up to gusts of 40 mph and possible blizzard conditions at times. Matt Anderson has made the difficult, but smart, decision to postpone the Toledo Christmas Bird Count originally scheduled for Sunday (see http://www.rarebird.org for updates). The Fremont count is also scheduled for Sunday, and organizers are conferring now about whether to postpone that count, as that area would get much of the same weather predicted for Toledo. Obviously, anyone planning to go on counts in n.w. Ohio or s.e. Michigan on Sunday should check to see if they're going to run as scheduled. For serious birders the instinct is always to go out and try to find birds no matter how bad the weather is, but this macho approach doesn't work as well for something that's supposed to be a census. No one can find as many birds in a blizzard as in calm weather, so the data gathered becomes misleading, artificially lowering the totals and giving the appearance that populations were down. So aside from obvious factors of health and safety, there are ornithological reasons for not running a count in terrible conditions. Tough birders who go out in bad weather should focus on finding rarities, not on trying to make careful counts -- in other words, if you abandon your senses, you should abandon your census too. Kenn Kaufman Rocky Ridge, Ohio ______________________________________________________________________ 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]