Today (Monday, May 25, 2009) at 12:00 noon my wife and I were walking south on the bike trail on the east side of the Olentangy river at The Ohio State University campus, just south of the crew dock and the bridge at Campus Loop Road. We spotted a dark bird with a heron-like neck gliding through the water approximately 30 yards away. The body was entirely submerged. The bird continued south in the water, then turned north, and then flew out of the water. It took some time to get airborne, longer than a heron. We thought we had seen a heron. Returning home, we checked a few bird books. The picture in The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds, Eastern Region, on plate 104 looks very similar to the bird we saw. However, the description on page 452 says that the anhinga is a bird of southern marshes and swamps with a range extending northward to Tennessee. The habitat at Ohio State is a slow moving river with narrow marshy edge, so it is not a swamp and Ohio seems considerably farther north than the anhinga's range. Anyway, the location is so accessible maybe other bird lovers might try their luck... ------------------- Anne & Jeff McSweeney ______________________________________________________________________ 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]