On the way home from a family affair yesterday, I stopped briefly to view the "wetlands" at the Coonpath Road intersection of SR 33, (the four-lane "freeway", not old Rt. 33) north of Lancaster. I hadn't planned to stop, and didn't have my scope, but with my old glove-box binos, I saw: Killdeer - 50+ Semipalmated plover - at least 1 Misc. peeps - @ 10 Solitary sandpiper - at least 3 Yellowlegs sp. - @ 5 Possible dowitcher sp. There were also cedar waxwings hawking insects, and a couple of eastern kingbirds doing the same, in addition to well over 1000 juvenile and female red-winged blackbirds. The water was very low, and algae covered the mud, but it looks like pretty good habitat right now. Someone with sharper shorebird ID skills and better optics than I had yesterday will probably do a lot better, but I thought the spot was worth posting for anyone in the area. Keep your eyes out for shorebirds at unusual places this year. I have been seeing shorebirds at the parking lot catch basins that seem to be located at every new store in north Newark. There have been peeps and solitary sandpipers at the Kohl's store; killdeer and some unidentified "other" at the Home Depot, etc. Even the catch basin at the mall in Heath had a couple of shorebirds. Also interesting this morning when I walked my dogs about 7 a.m., there were an estimated 500 chimney swifts swirling around the smoke stack of the old North Elementary school on Deo Drive. Some of them seemed to be going back into the stack, but mostly they were just swirling and swirling around the building, just above the top of the stack. Have a great day! Margaret Bowman Licking Co., OH ______________________________________________________________________ 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]