Recently on this list questions have come up about record-late occurrences of certain species. With the recent warming of the climate, observers also wonder about record-early appearances in the spring, as well as the occasional surprising mid-winter bird. No doubt more and more records are going to be broken, not only because of the weather, but because more and more birders, increasingly knowledgeable and interconnected, are on the scene. Several times over the past week questions have arisen about late records, and it might be worthwhile mentioning where the answers are. For these and many other inquiries, your first resort should be Peterjohn's "The Birds of Ohio." This work covers the published record with great care. Still, it does not treat museum specimens, and of course contains no information since climate warming seems to have increased its pace over recent years. Checklists, for all their usefulness, seldom treat these outlying records. The most detailed, the OBRC annotated checklist, linked at http://www.ohiobirds.org/publications/checklist/checklists.php is great for records of rare species and normal periods for the rest, but does not treat casual or isolated occurrences at odd times of year. Periodicals cover and update such records. "North American Birds" does this on a regional level, but seldom bothers to recognize late and early records for Ohio. "The Cleveland Bird Calendar" and "The Bobolink" keep good track of records in the counties they cover, and "The Ohio Cardinal" does so on a state level. These are the sources on which books like "The Birds of Ohio" largely rely, and the best source of this information. For late Ohio records of ruby-throated hummingbird, for example, Peterjohn is out of date. Two well-documented birds in 2002 stayed until 30 November, one in Westerville and one in Massillon; the Bobolink published the latter, the Cardinal both. The current Toledo bird is setting a new record with each passing day, and will be duly chronicled in the latter journal. Peterjohn is understandably vague about late records of ospreys, another source of questions recently. The great majority of published December and January records come from Christmas Bird Counts, where the numbers of inexperienced observers involved provoke extra scrutiny olf such reports. In many cases compilers' annotations cast doubt on these IDs, but there are a few with varying degrees of documentation. I find only a handful of winter records accepted by periodicals. One was documented in Lorain Co on 13 Jan 1980, another reported in Hocking Co on 20 Feb 1982, and birds were photographed in 2004 in Darke and Clark counties on 12 and 15 December respectively. The earliest spring arrival seems to date from 9 Mar 1991. So Ohio seems to have accepted records of ospreys in every month of the year. Bill Whan Columbus ______________________________________________________________________ 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]