Hi Everyone Beth and I joined the Kirtland Bird Club outing at East 72nd Street on the Lake Eerie shore this morning—we got there about 8 AM and stayed for a couple of hours. Conditions were very good—about 20 degrees F, winds of maybe 10 mph off the lake, the surface all iced in except for a nice pool of open water (it did start snowing pretty heavily just before we left). There were over a dozen other people there as well. But two things were missing: first, where were the expected thousands of dead and dying gill shad? And then, maybe because the gill shad weren’t there, the gull numbers were much smaller than we had hoped— instead of the tens of thousands that we sometimes see at this time of year (and that we saw from the Jan 2 boat trip), there were perhaps a couple thousand gulls around the open pool. Here’s what we saw: Mallard American Black Duck Common Goldeneye Bufflehead Redhead Canvasback Red-breasted Merganser Hooded Merganser Lesser Scaup (other people had Gadwall, but we didn’t see them) Ring-billed Gull Herring Gull Great Black-backed Gull (really good numbers of both adults and 1st and 2nd year birds) Lesser Black-backed Gull (a couple) Glaucous Gull (1!) Canada Goose Double-crested Cormorant (1) Rock Pigeon Best wishes, Steve Cagan Cleveland Heights, Cuyahoga County Steve Cagan, photographer [log in to unmask] www.stevecagan.com www.pbase.com/stevecagan 216-932-2753 (USA) ______________________________________________________________________ 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]