There has been some speculation about how the state-record Great Cormorant got to Ohio. A couple of people wrote to ask me about this privately, and I thought it would be worthwhile to post these thoughts to the listserve. Todd Eiben's discovery of the adult Great Cormorant at Cleveland on March 4th was a fantastic find, and he deserves a lot of credit for picking it out. But it wasn't completely unexpected; serious birders had been watching for this species in the state. It's true that Great Cormorant is essentially a coastal bird in North America (although not in the Old World, where it occurs far inland). But it also has a pattern of occurring far up river valleys, if only in small numbers. In the northeastern states, Great Cormorants have been found 140 miles up the Hudson River in the Albany area, 170 miles up the Connecticut River in Vermont, far up the Delaware River and the Susquehanna, and on many lakes and reservoirs at varying distances from these rivers. Farther north, Great Cormorants are common in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and they have been found far inland along the St. Lawrence River -- around Quebec City and Montreal, and a few times farther upriver, all the way to Lake Ontario. Around the edge of Lake Ontario there are scattered records -- certainly it's a very rare bird there, but there have been a few dozen records over the last few decades, on both the New York and Ontario shorelines, all the way to the western end of the lake near Niagara Falls. Given this pattern of occurrence, it was just a matter of time before a wandering Great Cormorant found its way the short distance across to Lake Erie (perhaps flying up the Niagara River). There's no need to invoke the possibility of the bird riding a ship to get here. Indeed, it would seem bizarre for a cormorant to stay on a ship throughout its passage up the St. Lawrence River, across Lake Ontario, and then through the Welland Canal to Lake Erie. It strains plausibility to imagine the cormorant jumping off to hunt for fish along the way, then flying to catch up with its ship so it could continue its free ride. I know that Greg Miller produced a map showing strong winds pushing from about New Jersey toward Lake Erie just a day or two before the cormorant was found. It's not impossible that these winds brought the bird, but I think it's very unlikely. The bird would have had to fly a very long distance over land (including all the ridges of the Appalachians), ignoring all the rivers and small lakes it passed, which wouldn't be normal for the species in North America. I think it's most likely that this Great Cormorant came by way of the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario, extending a pattern of vagrancy that's already well established, and that it flew here under its own power. Kenn Kaufman Oak Harbor, OH ______________________________________________________________________ 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]