Adding to Frank Mantlik’s caution about care needed in identifying Black Scoters, here is an extract from my review article on the 2020-2021 Connecticut Christmas Bird Count in the October 2021 issue of The Connecticut Warbler. It concerns the general winter distributions of Surf, White-winged, and Black scoters along the Connecticut coastline. This is based on the last 70 years of CBC data for Connecticut’s coastal counts. "All three scoter species were well represented this year, with Old Lyme-Saybrook counting 235 Surf Scoters, Napatree recording 141 White-winged Scoters, and New London tallying 106 Black Scoters. These three benthic feeding, mollusk-eating divers have dissimilar distributions along the coast from Greenwich to the Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay. Surf Scoters are found in greatest abundance from Stratford-Milford to Napatree, with New London usually boasting highest numbers. White-winged Scoter is most abundant from Westport to New Haven. Black Scoter is a species of Rhode Island’s Atlantic coastal waters, occurring in rapidly decreasing numbers as one moves west along Connecticut’s Long Island Sound coastal waters.” Incidentally, both White-winged Scoter and Black Scoter have been reported in past years on our northern Christmas Bird Counts, albeit very rarely. Most remarkably, 15 Common Scoters were reported on the December 31, 1966 Hartford Christmas Bird Count. The regional CBC editor for New England made no special comment about this report, which was highlighted in bold by Hartford’s Compiler, Walter Charsky. At that time, Common Scoter was the common name in use for what is now known as Black Scoter in the Americas. Birds of the World currently regards Common Scoter and Black Scoter as separate species (allospecies, together constituting a superspecies) with primarily separate geographic distributions: Common Scoters winter on the Atlantic Coast of Europe and North Africa and in the Mediterranean. Confused, yet? The only scoter species to have been reported since 1950 from Connecticut’s mid-state counts is White-winged Scoter, one individual of which was seen on the Woodbury-Roxbury CBC on December 26, 1970. The regional CBC editor’s comment about this observation made by Neil Currie, boldly highlighted in the report, was “ good study." Steve Broker Cheshire