Recommended is an article from the Anchorage Daily News about a local naturalist who's banded over 20,000 redpolls in his back yard. Among the many interesting features is his experience with hoary vs. common redpolls. He avows that even after tens of thousands of encounters, he can't tell them reliably apart except in the hand, when he can take measurements; plumage characters seemingly overlap completely. Among the first 500 redpolls he banded this year, 71% were determined to be hoaries! He regards commons and hoaries as conspecific. Find this and more by entering "man who loved redpolls" into a search engine. Enjoy, 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]