I struggled to stand steady in the gale. One hand, unbidden, went to my neck for the little old leather bag I always carry there on a lanyard. Inside, for luck, is the smooth grey gizzard-stone of a Great Auk, a gift to my great-grandfather from fellow Irishman Sir Ernest Shackleton, whom he had taught to ski after they had gone up to Dulwich College. As the squall advanced over the lake’s tossing waves, I repositioned my hand to shield from snow the beacon on my experimental eBird Binocular; it would not do to have a scrambled signal on this occasion. I tried to keep the distant black-and-white dot in the field of view in the gusty wind. No problem: this instrument, still in development, is capable of automatically finding and instantly identifying rare birds in any field of view while sending a confirmatory image and coordinates to eBird Central. It also has filters which will count, then erase from the field of view, all local commoner species, for example in Ohio reducing one’s view of a huge flock mostly of ring-billed and herring gulls to any mew or Heermann’s gulls, etc., that might be present. Already a readout was visible on the viewfinder---PAAU, Hawaiian for parakeet auklet--a first record for Ohio! It was more than the frigid wind that made my hands tingle anew. I reminded myself that soon arrays of microcameras with internet links will keep track of birds across the continent, all without requiring actual observers to head out into actual weather. I hurried for a mug of warm grog in my e-car, where I skipped through the camera images and confirmed records of my find on the internet and made sure the auklet had been added to my online Ohio list. Bill Whan Columbus ______________________________________________________________________ Ohio-birds mailing list, a service of the Ohio Ornithological Society. Please consider joining our Society, at www.ohiobirds.org/site/membership.php. Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list. You can join or leave the list, or change your options, at: listserv.miamioh.edu/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=OHIO-BIRDS Send questions or comments about the list to: [log in to unmask]