The final list for 2011 in Franklin county stands at 259 native bird species. Actually, that is just where the list stood in late October! Really, we haven’t added a single one since then---unless someone forget to report something. We didn’t count, birdwise, on our November turning out like a normal October, and December like November. Obviously, missing out on a normal first month of winter deprived us of chances at many species we expected or at least had reason to hope for. Somewhere we missed another entire month's worth of new species! Birds of the north have hung back. In January, tundra swans and sandhill cranes are *still* coming through in good numbers. Waterbirds are apparently continuing to bask in northern waters normally frozen by January. A good warmer season up north lasted much longer than usual, apparently. I think it’s only fair that if climate warming is going to short us on birds of the north now, we should at least have seen more birds from the south earlier. Like painted buntings. Neotropic cormorants. Sandwich terns. Swainson’s warblers. Red-cockaded woodpeckers. Groove-billed anis. It’s only fair. Oh, we did get a few of these, if you remember the royal tern, the purple gallinule. But all those wayward waterbirds, those gone gulls, and those wanton winter finches—-they really hurt us in what could have been a record run. Or maybe this was still a record; I don't know. But we still did very well, thanks to the sharp-eyed and enthusiastic observers who birded here and told the rest of us about them. We saw, and reported, what was here. Now for the first time we have an idea about how many birds can show up here when we pay attention. As for the future, we get only twelve months for a year, and it’ll be hard if we have new birds in only ten of them. That’s something else we can learn from. The list of birds seen and birds missed can be found on the Columbus Audubon site at http://www.columbusaudubon.org/production/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=675&Itemid=216 . Thanks to all, 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]