I checked a couple spots on the southeastern part of Cayuga Lake this morning. This is, if not the most frozen I have ever seen the lake, at least fairly close. The thick ice extended well beyond the red lighthouse and almost to the brown pilings/buoy, and the thinner, newly-formed ice extended well beyond this buoy, ending at about the railroad track crossing where East Shore Drive heads up hill and slightly away from the lake. Not too far north of this open water, however, the lake once again became mostly frozen, this time with scattered but extensive thin ice islands, like the ones that have been forming overnight on some of the coldest days recently, but even more extensive. I wasn't able to get another look at the lake until Myers, but the ice off the point and marina was quite extensive as well, and the Aythya flock that has been hanging around off Ladoga was all but frozen out. Several hundred Redhead, scaup, and Canvasbacks were squeezed into a small open water patch a bit to the east of Ladoga. The marina was unsurprisingly completely frozen (it had been full of birds three or four days ago), and the only ducks I saw out on the open lake (both north of East Shore and at Myers) were Common Goldeneye and Common Mergansers. The TUNDRA SWAN flock sleeping on the spit between Ladoga and the Myers marina has only increased, with at least 80 birds plus another 14 on the ice west of the marina and at least 12 with a goose flock along the shore east of Ladoga.
I will be interested to see what happens with the ice cover as the temperature continues to hover well below freezing over the next few days and beyond. I imagine that the Aurora Bay is still open, but we may end up getting some pretty interesting concentrations of birds in the areas that do manage to stay open. Jay -- Jay McGowan Macaulay Library Cornell Lab of Ornithology jw...@cornell.edu -- Cayugabirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/cayugabirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/Cayugabirds 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/CAYU.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
