Creature Feature

The ground held a faint trace of snow as we wandered through Killdeer Plains that morning, looking for winter specialties. Raptors were already on our radar, with lots of Red-tailed hawks and Kestrels, but a slender buteo hawk sitting on a tiny sprig out in a field caught our eye. Just by the behavior alone, […]

By Rob Thorn The mud made a crunching sound underfoot, with some parts of it frozen for the first few inches. It was a freezing December day as we walked around the mudflats at the upper end of Hoover Reservoir, mostly looking for waterfowl and gulls. Some of the shallow pools had iced over, but

We heard the “thunk” as something hit the window. “Honey, check outside, I think a bird hit the window again.” But by the time one of us got around to it, there was no sign of the supposedly stunned bird. Sometimes, though, we’d see a Cooper’s Hawk winging away. Only later would we learn that

It was a chilly March morning at Clifton Gorge, where we had moved up our April trip to see if we could find very early spring wildflowers. There were lots of early Hepatica and a few other species, but the big surprise was Louisiana Waterthrushes. Several were singing along the full-flowing and noisy Little Miami

Columbus Audubon thanks Laura Dornan and the Canton Audubon Society for their kind permission to republish this article. An apt description for why this Arctic breeder comes down to the large grasslands, hay-fields, and reclaimed strip mines of eastern Ohio every winter. They begin to arrive in Ohio the third week of October through the