4th TIME: For those of you keeping count, Sunday’s Mothers Day
snowfall was the fourth time the peepers have had a covering of
white stuff this year — one more than is essential for the official
start of spring.

ON WING: Apparently, those “big black birds” are indeed
cormorants which are migrating through the area.

Jim Eckstrom, who lives in Bradford but drives to Olean, N.Y.,
every day, has seen two cormorants at Hefner Reservoir on Thursday
evening and a third one morning in a pond along Interstate 86 in
the town of Carrollton.

Jim tells us that the cormorants — double-crested cormorants, to
be specific — are migrating from the Gulf Coast region, up along
the Mississippi River drainage, to the upper Great Lakes, where
they nest over the summer. The birds seen in the Bradford area are
simply stopping in local waterways, probably to catch fish, as they
migrate north.

Cormorants are much more common along Atlantic and Pacific
coasts, but the Great Lakes cormorant population has dramatically
increased since the 1980s because of a decrease in toxic chemical
use and an increase in fish stocks in the Great Lakes.

Jim says cormorants look somewhat similar in shape to a bird
familiar to local residents, the merganser, also commonly called
“fish ducks.” Cormorants, which are uniformly dark in color and
larger than mergansers, have an extremely low profile in the water
and, of course, can frequently be seen diving under the surface in
search of fish.

Meanwhile, Jim tells us he also saw another similar kind of
fowl, which had made a brief stopover Tuesday evening in the Hefner
reservoir while migrating north — a loon.

BIRD NEWS: While we’re on the subject of birds, we thought we’d
report on a new nationwide tracking system to report on the
developing situation with birds in the Gulf Coast affected by the
oilspill.

Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, N.Y., tells us that Gulf
Coast bird watchers are surveying beaches and marshes for birds,
and entering their counts at www.ebird.org . In this way, they can
help scientists track hundreds of species that could be affected as
the oil spreads toward land and help guide the region’s recovery
effort.

Data is updated every hour and may be viewed at the website.