The changing weather seems to have displaced many of the shorebirds reported earlier in the week at Pickerel Creek. A flooded field along the road to the check station yielded only a single solitary sandpiper. (Gee, that seems appropriate....) Only a couple of least sandpipers were visible near the observation tower; hiking dikes further to the east produced a nice group of five or six stilts within a mixed yellowlegs flock, along with a couple of pectoral and more least sandpipers. We also turned up a spotted sandpiper in the area, along with a couple of solitaries. Many areas that were dry to just muddy now have standing water as a result of heavy rains yesterday. The ponds at Willow Point apparently have been given over completely to deep water habitat. No shorebirds were in sight, although eagles were downright abundant. If anyone from ODW is reading this, can you comment on plans (or lack thereof) for shorebird habitat management here? This site certainly has great potential and, in fact, has given us some excellent shorebirding recently, so we can hope for a drawdown. The larger ponds at Killdeer Plains also were full -- that is, full of water, not of birds. On the non-shorebird front, swallows are congregating in huge numbers at various locations along the bay. Pickerel Creek in particular hosted many, many tree swallows, with a considerable number of banks and the occasional barn. An impressive concentration of these species was found at the end of the check point road. -- Bill Heck ______________________________________________________________________ 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]