Hi all, Usually we¹re away this weekend (usually in the UP of Michigan, winter birding) But this year we¹re in Cleveland, so we thought at last we can participate in the GBBC. So we did observations around our house and at our three nearby good birding spots‹Lake View Cemetery, Forest Hill Park and Shaker Lakes, on three successive days. The thing about this was the relatively low level of avian activity‹well, relatively low at the cemetery and VERY low at the other two places. At the cemetery we a couple of really unusual birds‹a Green-winged Teal and nine Redheads‹ and a big flock of American Robins (we counted 68, but there were certainly more). We also had half a dozen Juncos and half a dozen White-throated Sparrows there. But aside from that...almost nothing. At Forest Hill we had about 5 total individual birds, and only 7 at Shaker Lakes. These are areas that are usually pretty reliably productive. Of course, mid-February is not a period of high levels of activities in these parts, but this seemed particularly dead to me. What was surprising was that we saw no Blue Jays, Cardinals, Crows, almost no woodpeckers or nuthatches. In all these days we had exactly one Starling‹and that was at the house, where we also did have Cardinals and Blue Jays Beth would say, ³We can see more birds at home...² Hoping you¹re all seeing more, Steve Cagan Cleveland Heights, Cuyahoga County -------------------------------------------- Steve Cagan, photographer [log in to unmask] www.stevecagan.com www.pbase.com/stevecagan www.stevecagan.blogspot.com http://socialdocumentary.net/photographer/stevecagan 216-932-2753 (USA) ______________________________________________________________________ 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]