Migrant shorebirds are still passing through, and before this movement ends southward movements of others will have already started. Ohio has few breeding shorebirds. There are intriguing but apocryphal reports of nesting solitary sandpipers and lesser yellowlegs, and piping plover nests disappeared here long ago, but we do have large numbers of breeding killdeers and woodcocks, fewer snipes, vanishing upland sandpipers, the occasional Wilson's phalarope, and a single record for the black-necked stilt. And the most interesting of all, the common but often overlooked spotted sandpiper... Howard Eskin offers a nice gallery of photos of this species at http://www.howardsview.com/SpottedSandpiper/SpottedSandpiper.html . Study of this bird during the summer is very rewarding, and fascinating in many ways. First of all, like a number of shorebird species (but uniquely in Ohio) it is polyandrous: the female courts with, and lays four eggs apiece for, a number of males, and leaves incubation duties to them while she defends the whole territory. Young birds can run and swim half an hour after hatching. Spotties have many distinctive behaviors, like their gait and feeding methods, their unique flight characteristics (including "flying" underwater [see http://elibrary.unm.edu/sora/Auk/v111n01/p0190-p0191.pdf ]), their disinclination to flock with other birds, and their ability to perch like sparrows atop marsh vegetation or even on utility wires. All these quirky and often charming behaviors can be seen in summer here if you take the time to watch this very successful bird. A. C. Bent has 19 pages of authoritative and very readable material on this species in Part Two of "Life Histories of North American Shore Birds" (1927). As far as I can tell, the full text of this publication is no longer freely available on the Web, but is in libraries and can be picked up in used-book stores if you're lucky. If anyone knows of a complete text on line that anyone can read, please let us know. (And oh, yeah, I know about the BNA). 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]