Some buddies and I stopped by Haul Road yesterday (this is the north-south industrial road through an old quarry, crossing Frank Rd (Rte 104) just east of the exit from I-71. There is an osprey platform there just on the right after you leave the freeway onto Frank Rd, where the birds nested last year. This year, however, they have spurned our help and chosen the top of a utility-line pole close to where Haul Rd meets Frank Rd downhill, and are building a nest from scratch. The old eagle nest, too, has been abandoned, and is now occupied by a family of great horned owls. Their nest is easy to see now with the leaves off, and is across the quarry pool, a bit north of the new osprey nest. Not a lot farther on is a new active eagle nest at about the same height but farther north. We also repeatedly saw red-tailed hawks sailing over the area. On the other side of Frank, Haul Rd. heads down to the new City vehicle impound lot, which replaces the old one on a site not far north, now occupied by the new Audubon Center on Whittier Street, where there is another active citified osprey nest. Haul Road is in many ways a city boneyard, scarred by two centuries of exploitation for sewage ponds, dumps, and excavations along the Scioto River, but there are some patches of habitat between the cyclopean mounds of construction debris where even something like a harrier might even show up to swell the raptorial list. It's interesting to speculate why raptors should be the first birds to reclaim areas we've despoiled. Maybe it's the rats. In the past, overzealous corporate security people have chased off birders who pulled over on the wide margins of Haul Road to check out the quarry, but they have backed off recently, perhaps having discovered the difference between spotting scopes and shoulder-launched RPGs. If you feel intimidated, there is a small park with a roofed picnic area where you can sit and watch all the nests (scope advised), however. Squeezed between the freeway and this flooded quarry flows the old Scioto River, rerouted straight as a rule. If you care to, you can summon up views from space on your computer of what our species has done to this major river, quarrying limestone and dumping garbage and sewage and debris for two hundred years, but you have to visit in person to see the inroads now being made by the original inhabitants. In other quarry news, the island in the vast quarry next to the Shrum Mound on McKinley St is being filled with nests of great blue herons and d-c cormorants; the great egrets should be arriving in short order. To see them, you have to climb up the mound, a relic of more benign human efforts two thousand years ago. Good birding 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]