headed out to hit Lake Erie this morning @ 7:30 with my buddies Haans and Tom - first birds of the day?? the Rt 6 Bald Eagle pair (nice start!) Lorain drove to the marina @ first - TONS of birds!!! on the east there were a couple thousand RBGulls on the west in the docks were hundreds of RBMergs, a dozen or so Coots, a couple dozen mallards, a few dozen Bonies and a handful of Common Mergs what caught our eyes here was that beyond the docks (in river) was a HUGE number of birds (gulls and mergs). so - over the bridge to the dirt road on the west side of the river we went - birds, birds, birds from the bridge out past the mouth of the river - many thousand Mergs! maybe a 20:1 ration of RBMergs to Common Mergs (many mergs starting to display beautiful breeding plumage!) sprinkled in with the mergs were a few hundred gulls (mostly Herring) we started by heading out as far north as we could and ran into Gabe and Emil informed by them that they already had Thayer's and Iceland we headed back to the bridge area and scanned found among the masses we found Thayer's Gull - 1 California Gull - 1 Lesser Black-backed Gull - 1 we did not relocate Gabe and Emil's earlier located Iceland Gulls Great Black-backed Gulls - 6ish we hung around for a while and decided to head east Wendy Park/Whiskey Island just before exiting Haans spotted a Bald Eage flying south into the city marina docks/ice packed with only RBGulls (thousand?) a few RBMergs and mallards out in open water (but inside breakwall) were more RBGulls and a few hundred RBMergs we drove to end of road to the river and headed out toward Coast Guard station we found only a few dozen Coots and a hundred or so sleeping RBGulls a man said that a few minutes prior the river was full of gulls and ducks, but a passing tugboat scared them all off - one cool surprise was a Northern Mockingbird that greeted us as we hit the shore up the walkway out between shore were a couple hundred gulls asleep on the ice (only a few were Herring) CEI/E 72nd Street very few birds (we did drive slowly past Burke on the marginal - no owls/raptors etc) less than 20 Mergs less than 30 Gulls flying/on water only interesting was a small raft of Canvasbacks - 7 nice weather! nice birding today!! buster ______________________________________________________________________ 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]