Hi, I spent this morning from dawn till about 8 am on the boardwalk at the north end of Hoover Res. Nothing super exciting, but it was nice to get out and see some shorebirds. The water was still pretty high, so there wasn't quite as much muddy shoreline as there may be in the coming weeks. Best thing about the morning was that there was good mud just below the end of the boardwalk, and lots of the sandpipers didn't seem to mind my proximity. So I got some REALLY good studies and comparisons of several species. Some were almost too close even for binoculars! For example, I got to really study the back and wing feather patterns of a juvenile "prairie" Short-billed Dowitcher. I've never seen one that close-up before. There were tons of Yellowlegs, and by my best judgment (almost all were pretty dang close) they were all Lessers. Their calls all sounded the same (flat, mostly one or two note calls), none looked noticeably larger, none seemed to have upturned bills. I almost convinced myself that one Yellowlegs had too much barring on the flanks to be a Lesser, but then he walked up next to another Lesser and was the EXACT same size. And I realized the barring was just remnants of the breeding plumage. Here's my list: ~30 Lesser Yellowlegs (3 or 4 were intermediate in molt stage between adult breeding and winter plumage) ~20 Semipalmated Sandpipers ~10 Least Sandpipers 1 Pectoral Sandpiper 4 Solitary Sandpipers 1 Spotted Sandpiper 1 Short-billed Dowitcher ~15 Killdeer 2 Semipalmated Plovers 1 Green Heron 4 Great Egrets 15 Great-blue Herons 2 Belted Kingfishers 2 Osprey ~12 Ring-billed Gulls 4 Caspian Terns Lots of Cormorants, Mallards, and tons of Canada Geese Have a good Labor Day Weekend! Nate Nye Hilliard, 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]