I made a general tour of several parts of the Hoover Nature Preserve today to determine how much damage was done to my nest box trail by the storms Sunday afternoon. The damage was devastating in many areas. So many trees with nest boxes were down in the areas I checked that I will begin doing maintenance as if I had never started. I will recover the boxes from the downed trees and reinstall them at new locations. The bottom line, instead of 81 boxes to go, it's 250 again, as I will need to determine the nest boxes that will need to be reinstalled or replaced if damaged beyond use. The one positive is that this occurred after the Prothonotary Warblers finished nesting and headed south. Linda came along with me and while there we did note what activity was present. The five American White Pelicans are still present and we watched them as they fed right off the boardwalk at Area M. Later they all perched on a log in the water further off the boardwalk, but they were still very viewable. There were a variety of shorebirds near the boardwalk including 13 Short-billed Dowitchers, 6 Long-billed Dowitchers, 2 Stilt Sandpipers, 4 Greater Yellowlegs, 2 Lesser Yellowlegs, 2 Solitary Sandpipers, 1 Spotted Sandpiper, 11 Sanderlings, 6 Least Sandpipers, 3 Semipalmated Plovers and many Killdeer. We could see many other shorebirds south of the island with the Osprey platform and over by Wiese Road, but sans a spotting scope we didn't identify them. There also were 9 Great Egrets, 1 immature Bald Eagle and 1 Osprey at Area M. Area N looked like the area had been bombed. Trees were toppled like pick-up-sticks. I will need to recover and reinstall 9 nest boxes in just this area. As we walked through the devastation in the back portion of Area N we stumbled into a flourish of warblers.They included Tennessee, Orange-crowned, Cape May, Blackburnian, Yellow-throated, Black-and-white and Wilson's Warblers. Charlie Bombaci Hoover Nature Preserve **************Psssst...Have you heard the news? There's a new fashion blog, plus the latest fall trends and hair styles at StyleList.com. (http://www.stylelist.com/trends?ncid=aolsty00050000000014) ______________________________________________________________________ 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]