Our four-man Kingston CBC team had a tough time finding even 75% of our usual species number on New Year's Day. The unrelenting stiff winds, falling temps, and unfilled feeders made finding many species tough. Still, we may have seen more birds than anyone yesterday. A few years back we estimated over 80 thousand common grackles with other blackbirds in a single flock in our Ross Co territory; some were dubious till they saw our white-spangled vehicle. This year we stood wondering as an awesome river of birds hurried overhead for about ten minutes; ten minutes later we watched as more birds, clouds of them, rolled over one another in solid black waves in a cornfield. It reminded me of accounts of passenger pigeons feeding. We saw six or eight other smaller groups--still in the five figures--later in the day, but did not count them as they could easily have represented splinters of the larger mass. One of the better ways we employed to count them was to quickly develop a sense of how long it took a thousand birds to pass overhead; it came out to about three seconds, and matched fairly well results using other methods of estimating huge gatherings. We agreed we could reliably report at least a quarter of a million birds. Different flocks differed in composition. The "river" of birds had numbers of smaller black birds--brown cowbirds and red-winged blackbirds, and when some perched we saw a few rusty blackbirds--and the birds eating spilled corn had all four plus a few starlings, but varied in the percentage of the smaller birds. The two large flocks we watched in oak groves were close to a hundred percent common grackles; perhaps acorns are too big for smaller birds to handle. A friend from Cincinnati told me they had a great CBC the other day, but missed common grackle. Just one would have tied them with the Toledo CBC's excellent total species count. Sorry, we didn't intend to hog them all... 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]