Whimbrels, sometimes in good numbers, always pass through Ohio in a hurry in late May, when far fewer are seen on the ground than in flight. Their quite brief passage is over now. They breed in two widely separated areas, in the Low Arctic near Hudson Bay, and the High Arctic in Alaska and the Northwest Territories. It's always been thought the ones Ohioans see are headed from Central and South America to Hudson Bay, while the Alaskan birds move up the west coast. Not necessarily so, it's been learned. Scientists from The Nature Conservancy and the College of William & Mary have been studying shorebirds in Virginia, where the densest concentrations of whimbrels in the western hemisphere have been recorded on the Delmarva peninsula. This is usually the birds' last stopover before their trip to the breeding grounds, and where they gorge themselves on fiddler crabs to fuel their journey. This spring a female, weighing 640 grams (40% more than the heaviest individual reported in the literature) after some time at this staging area, was fitted with a satellite transmitter. She subsequently took off on a non-stop flight of no more than 146 hours, ending up 3200 miles away at the Mackenzie River in Alaska! Like the better-publicized east coast stopover of red knots, a similar tradition among whimbrels underlines the importance of a quite small staging area and a singular food source. These birds are capable of some prodigious feats of flight, but they must rely on a frail network of suitable places to touch down to feed. Like the red knots that stage a bit farther north along the Atlantic coast, these birds have showed dramatic declines in numbers in recent decades. 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]