We were at Mosquito Reservoir around noon and saw what we believed to be 4 Red Phalaropes. There were pretty far, even looking through the scope and were in the general vicinity of a large group of Bonaparte's Gulls. That is what we 1st thought they were but they were somewhat apart from the gulls and they just looked different. Our biggest problem to just saying they were phalaropes stems from them seeming to be the same size as the gulls. But I don't think we ever got a good comparison with something we could definitely tell was a gull and so weren't sure if there was maybe several more phalaropes than the 4. But the 4 we could see the best really seemed to sit higher in the water & had longer necks. The bills seemed longer & thinner than a gull's bill would be but not by much and again, they were really far away, so we coudn't be too sure we were seeing the bills well enough to tell. For me, the most telling field mark was it looked like there was a solid black area from the eye back towards the back of the head and it looked wide. The top of the heads appeared to be all white with little to no dark coloring but I never got a look from the back of the birds. They stayed in profile the whole time. The most interesting thing was the way they fed. No, no spinning in circles...that would have made it too easy. These guys would just tip up with their rear ends in the air, much like a mallard, but much quicker. They would rock down & back up all in one motion. When they were tipped, it looked like their tail was black, or was it the wing tips of a gull we were seeing? None of the other birds in the vicinity did that even once. We could tell the gulls were Bonies partly because they would also fly around and we could see the white leading edge of the wings. These 4 guys never flew. But they did look different. We finally decided we couldn't be sure enough to call them Red Phalaropes, or phalaropes of any kind for that matter. But does anyone else have any thoughts? Is it too late in the year for phalaropes to be passing through? Is it possible we couldn't tell size difference accurately if the phalaropes & gulls weren't close together? Is that feeding behavior definitive of either of those birds? And can anyone else confirm, one way or the other, whether they were Bonapartes or phalaropes? Laura Dornan Stark Co ______________________________________________________________________ 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]