Well, we've all heard some good suggestions about the birding calendar in Ohio sites, some more self-serving than others--but you newbies will get used to that. Another dimension to explore is history. Knowing something about birds in years gone by--their populations, habitats, extinctions, extirpations, introductions, odd records, etc.--adds an extra dimension. You can learn what the Black Swamp was really like, and the prairies and the Appalachian forests, how the canal system changed Ohio's birdlife, or how unimaginable numbers of passenger pigeons disappeared in only a few decades in the state. Of course there were not always chimneys for chimney swifts, or barns for barn swallows. Believe it or not, ring-billed gulls were almost unheard of in Ohio a century ago, and not long before that swallow-tailed kites were common. Nearly one of every ten species on the Ohio list hasn't been acceptably documented over the past 25 years; four of them never will be seen again. The last Ohio sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker occurred in Miami County in 1804. There are helpful historical sources for finding knowledge accumulated over the decades about our birds: The current official checklist of Ohio's 422 bird species is at http://www.ohiobirds.org/publications/checklist/official.php J. P. Kirtland's early work (1838) on the birds of Ohio may be found at http://www.kirtlandbirdclub.org/writers_gallery/introducing_jpkirtland.htm another interesting read is "Proceedings of the Cleveland Academy of Natural Science, 1845-1859" via Google books. J. M Wheaton's 1882 work "Report on the Birds of Ohio, Lynds Jones's "The Birds of Ohio," and William L. Dawson's "The Birds of Ohio" (both 1903) are excellent reading and also available on-line from Google Books or in good libraries. An extensive annotated bibliography devoted to the birds of Ohio can be searched at http://www.ohiobirds.org/resources/bibliography.pdf , and issues of thirteen national ornithological journals may be searched at http://elibrary.unm.edu/sora/ . Welcome to all new Ohio birders, Bill Whan Columbus ______________________________________________________________________ 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]