After missing most of September with a bug I was nice enough not to share, I finally got out of the house and began servicing my nest boxes at the Hoover Nature Preserve. I had a bad case of cabin fever. The deer mice are using many nest boxes as their seasonal home. I had so many deer mice jumping out as I opened the nest boxes to clean them that it was like standing in front of a baseball batting practice machine gone mad. Both the mice and I survived the experience. In the areas with my nest boxes there is a thick canopy formed by the trees and there was much activity to distract me. In addition the mudflats along the west shore hosted a small variety of lingering shorebirds, gulls and egrets along with a few birds of prey. Charlie Bombaci Species observed include: Double-crested Cormorant Great Blue Heron Great Egret Turkey Vulture Canada Goose Mallard Osprey Bald Eagle Red-tailed Hawk Killdeer Dunlin Ring-billed Gull Herring Gull Common tern Mourning Dove Red-bellied Woodpecker Yellow-bellied Sapsucker Downy Woodpecker Northern Flicker Eastern Phoebe Blue-headed Vireo Blue Jay American Crow Tree Swallow Carolina Chickadee Tufted Titmouse White-breasted Nuthatch Carolina Wren Golden-crowned Kinglet American Robin Gray Catbird European Starling Cedar Waxwing Orange-crowned Warbler Nashville Warbler Cape May Warbler Yellow-rumped Warbler Black-throated Green Warbler Blackpoll Warbler Wilson’s Warbler Eastern Towhee Song Sparrow White-throated Sparrow Northern Cardinal American Goldfinch ______________________________________________________________________ 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]