Spring, by the calendar, starts tomorrow. Lots of folks have been reporting spring "arrivals"--red-winged blackbirds, turkey vultures, common grackles, etc., but all these species have been present winter long. Blackbirds can be found year-round: I've seen thousands on January 1 Ohio CBCs, and hundreds of thousands of grackles at the same time. Turkey vultures are more thinly distributed in the north, but they do not disappear in winter. In fact, this winter has been so mild overall that tundra swans--which yearly occur in the hundreds at refugia like Ottawa NWR--have wintered in the thousands far more widely, causing some observers to report "trumpeter swans" in the hundreds. Ditto for sandhill cranes; the local family here in Pickaway County stayed here the whole winter except for a brief vacation, and the Franklin County flock may have done likewise, like the Wayne Co birds. So many of the species people are calling "firsts" or early arrivals are really only routinely wintering birds, or laggards who saw no need to proceed further south. Genuine spring arrivals will soon include woodcocks (but not snipes, some of which wintered, and *not* nighthawks, which don't appear till late April), yellowlegs, pectoral sandpipers, swallows, blue-winged teals, loons, ospreys, fox sparrows, pine warblers and Louisiana waterthrushes, pipits, phoebes, etc. The warm winter has encouraged larger than normal winter numbers of some cold-weather birds, but there is little evidence that it's encouraged birds to accelerate their northward migration, which is far more conservative than their willingness to hang around in a warm winter. 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]