On a trip for Ohio River tomatoes and local corn, I managed to side-track us for a look around the Cook's Creek Golf Course in Pickaway Co, where great egret nests were found in 1995 (G. Garver, "First inland Nesting Attempt by the Great Egret" Ohio Cardinal 21(1):31-33). All the folks at the mostly-deserted course--it was 94 degrees--were especially welcoming and well-informed, and were nice enough to lend us a golf cart to drive down to where the Little Walnut joins the Scioto River, scene of the famous nesting pairs. They told us an eagle pair now reigned over the island on which the egrets had nested, and while they saw lots of egrets (migrants no doubt) in May and August-Sept, no on had seen them this summer, nests or not. We ran into an EPA employee censusing fish in the Scioto, and he hadn't seen any either. Nice spot, though, with lots of summer tanagers. On the way home we drove off 23 by way of the Pickaway Co Airport to Radcliffe Rd (scene of the black rails of not so long ago). For a mile and a quarter along that route (wherever at least one side of the road was CRP land instead of crops) the power lines (mostly the lower one) were jammed with bank swallows. Laura, awed but always in possession of her numerical instincts, estimated their numbers at ten thousand. Their spacing, if you filled in the empty spaces with birds from the upper wire, averaged about nine inches, so I worked it out as 8,800 birds. Either way, it was a mighty throng. These are usually the first swallows to gather in big pre-migratory roosts, and my guess is all the quarries etc. along this stretch provide a lot of sites for nesting colonies of this burrowing species. 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]