I was in Northwest Ohio yesterday (11/27) and had a couple hours to bird the Ottawa Refuge area. Generally it was pretty slow on the back roads in the area. The only things of note were large groups of tundra swans. I was surprised with the amount of roads I checked, I saw only 3 American kestrels. Twenty-five years ago the same drive would have yielded 20-30 birds. Maybe it was just a bad day. I walked the dikes at Ottawa Refuge and the best birds were all at the Crane Creek estuary at the north end of the trails. There was an immature SNOWY OWL that was sitting on a fallen dead tree in the back end of the estuary. At least half of the estuary was mudflat and the were a few shorebirds present. There were 6 killdeer, 2 lesser yellowlegs, 30+ dunlin and 1 long-billed dowitcher. there were also a couple hundred swans on the flats also. On my walk back to the parking lot I spotted a single tree swallow. It was flying over the mostly frozen marshes. On my drive home I stopped briefly at Huron and Lorain. Neither area had many Bonaparte's gulls. Both areas had quite a few ring-billed and lesser numbers of herring gulls. The only birds of note were 2 lesser black-backed gulls at Huron and 1 at Lorain. All were adults. John Pogacnik 4765 Lockwood Road Perry, OH 44081 (440) 259-2751 ______________________________________________________________________ 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]