This afternoon I took a 'walk-about' Shawnee Prairie Preserve and upon scanning the field behind the 'Red barn' I spotted 2 Sandhill Cranes wandering through the field. I continued to watch and scan and picked up 3 more further west. While watching the 3 to the west, one of them started to 'practice' his dance (that or didn't like the mud on its feet!) The whole area was alive with birdsong! Many, many different spp are very vocal. Spring is here! Happy Birding All ! Location: DCP - Shawnee Prairie Preserve Observation date: 3/14/08 Number of species: 23 Canada Goose X Turkey Vulture 2 Sandhill Crane 5 Killdeer X Mourning Dove X Red-bellied Woodpecker X Downy Woodpecker X Blue Jay X American Crow X Carolina Chickadee X Carolina Wren X American Robin X European Starling X American Tree Sparrow X Field Sparrow 1 Fox Sparrow 1 Song Sparrow X White-throated Sparrow X Dark-eyed Junco X Northern Cardinal X Red-winged Blackbird X Common Grackle X House Sparrow X (X = heard or saw many) 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]