I was in Northwest Ohio this weekend and had a little time to get out and do a little birding. Although I turned up a a couple decent birds, in general it was slow. There are not a lot of waterfowl around yet although today seemed to be appreciably better then Saturday with more geese around. I saw only a small number of snow buntings and only a couple longspurs despite doing a fair amount of looking. On Saturday I started in the Magee Marsh area. I did find a northern shrike at the end of the causeway there. When I got back to the beach area I was kind of surprised to see a huge number of fishermen out on the ice. I remarked to my son that these guys were idiots as the wind was gusting to about 30 mph out of the south. I told him that I bet later on that day the Coast Guard would be there rescuing them. That was about 9:45, by 10:15 the Coast Guard was heading out to rescue the idiots. I saw this often when I worked out at Crane Creek. If the fish are biting, they will be out there. If the wind is strong out of the south they will be out there and they will need rescuing. I guess things don't change. Needless to say when we saw all of them out there and the strong south winds, we cleared out of there so we did miss all the excitement (FYI, they were out there on the ice again today. Draw your own conclusions). From there we headed to Castalia. Along Route 6 just north of where Rte 269 turns toward Castalia, there was a blackbird flock of about 200 birds. Amongst the many red-wings and cowbirds, there was a single male YELLOW-HEADED BLACKBIRD. At Castalia, there was nice a nice mix of waterfowl, nothing unusual. Despite searching quite a few back roads we saw little else other than a turkey vulture just west of Port Clinton. On Sunday I went and hiked back at Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge. There were a few geese moving around, but little else. On the back roads I did run into a couple small flocks of snow buntings and a couple Lapland longspurs. On the way home I did run into a large flock of Canada geese about three mile west of Sheldon's Marsh. Amongst them were 6 WHITE-FRONTED GEESE and two snow geese. 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]