I just heard, or actually overheard, a brief squib on NPR this morning that a 41-year old osprey had just returned to a nest site in Scotland. This and the story that the 60-year old Laysan albatross and her egg had been spared in the tsunami led me to search the topic "longevity of birds," where there is some interesting information. Some of the hard data on lifespans of wild birds, obviously enough, come from a few individuals like the aforementioned that return year after year to a location like a nest and are recognizable (usually by a band or other marker), but most come from banding recaptures. One can imagine that relying only on the minuscule number of individual birds who happen to come into the hands of bird banders at least twice in their lifetimes tells us only a tiny bit. Some advocates of living forever--let us hope they also advocate sterility at the same time--point to birds as creatures who live unusually long despite their high metabolisms, also in defiance of theories about tissue oxidation and accumulation of metabolic by-products as causes of death. Probably 99+% of birds die by misadventure. One shocking statement in a discussion of the relatively long average life-spans of larger birds noted that "game birds are shorter-lived than their sizes would predict." 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]