Greetings!!!
What a great weekend!!! Audubon Miami Valley and the Ohio Ornithological 
Society sponsored their Owls of North American Symposium at Hueston Woods 
this weekend.  There were well over 200 people interested in birds 
assembled in one area--it was amazing!!! I was very impressed with how well 
the whole symposium was organized and run--despite the "best" weather 
mother nature could throw at us Sat night, everything went really, really 
well. My compliments to all those that worked so hard!!!!!!
The storm Sat night had a tremendous up-side [except for those that wound 
up in the ditch!]. The winds were blowing out of the south early Sun 
morning when I woke up--the temperature was 37 and enough rain had fallen 
to begin breaking up some of the ice that has locked in Brookville for the 
past couple weeks.  As Debbie Gross has been reporting we had between 70 
-80 coots that perished, trapped in a pool of water too small to take off 
from (great eagle food, however).  Several dozen coots were able to work 
their way to Sagamore and were feeding on a melted patch of grass on the 
golf course. Jill and I lead about 50 people to Brookville Sun morning--we 
started with the Northern Shrike (been here over 2 months now!), of the 53 
Sandhill Cranes at Dunlapsville Sat afternoon, 7 remained on Sun morning 
(the a couple dozen were seen feeding in the fields outside Liberty by 
other groups). Flocks of Red-wings, robins, Killdeer, and Common Grackles 
streamed over all morning-we had two flocks of meadowlarks. At Sagamore we 
had 16 species of ducks, including nearly 70 Canvasback, our first pair of 
Wood Ducks this spring, N. Pintail, GW Teal, our first RB Merg, and as we 
watched a single Sandhill pass overhead, the geese started to arrive from 
the fields. Among the hundreds of Canada's were 9 White-fronted Geese!!!
I hope this is the beginning of a great spring!!!
Cheers
Dave