Folks
Let me go out on a limb � this is a birding listserve . This could be a very good winter finch season since the drought was quite extensive covering much of North America.
I would not be surprised if we see Pine Grosbeak this winter in western Maryland, as well as Evening Grosbeak dispersed around the state. I don�t want to go that far out on the limb and say look for Boreal Owls yet. I need to learn more about the Saw Whet movement. My reasoning is because my acorn fruit has fallen early, and much of it is very small, or has no meat as all. If this is the situation in large parts of the normal wintering range of these finches � crossbills, grosbeaks, etc. � we may see the largest invasion ever. Birds need to eat and will look for the food while moving further out of their normal wintering range.
Check out these links.
http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/drought/nadm/nadm-201208.jpg
Don�t hold your breath, but keep your eyes and ears open. Learn the flight calls if you can, learn and bird preferred food sources, and study the plumages .
I have already had a Red-breasted Nuthatch, and a Purple Finch was calling around the house yesterday. I normally get a small flight of Purple Finches in November.
Good birding.
George
<gmjett...>
www.georgejett.net
From: Mikey Lutmerding
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2012 6:04 AM
To: <mdbirding...>
Subject: [MDBirding] Governor Bridge Red Crossbill follow up
Hi everyone,
I just wanted to pass along some additional information about the Red Crossbill at Governor Bridge Natural Area in Prince George's County. I sent the recording off and heard back from Matt Young at Cornell, he said the bird sounded perfect for a Type 3 Red Crossbill. Matt also mentioned that there are only a few recordings of type 3's from south of Pennsylvania and they came from the finch super-flight of 1997-98. I was able to make a spectrogram and actually got some nice results (despite the poor recording!) showing the typical type 3 call. If Red Crossbills do become more regular in the coming months, and I hope they do, it would be great to try and get recordings of them so we can document the types involved; as you can hear from my recording, even the really bad ones can contain valuable information. One thing that I have tried to remember is to have my recording app on any time I am in the field, if I had done this when the crossbill flew over the other day, I would not have had to wait for it to boot up, and could have gotten much better recordings.
A link to the spectrogram-
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikeycerw/
A few good resources on crossbill types-
http://ebird.org/content/ebird/news/introduction-to%20crossbill-vocalizations
http://madriverbio.com/wildlife/redcrossbill/
http://www.sibleyguides.com/2010/09/red-crossbill-call-types-act-like-species/
Good Birding!
Mikey
Mikey Lutmerding
Croom, MD
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