Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2000 20:24:15 -0400 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Steve Sanford Subject: County-listing Sermon MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I got a message from you [Bea Nicholls] asking: > ...what are you guys talking about when you say, "close out" species ? I believe someone addressed this briefly on Osprey within the last few months. I was going to write a short private reply, but ended up writing = a county-listing sermon/pep talk which I might as well make public: "Close-out" is county-listing talk. County-listing is, of course, maintaining a county-by-county list of your sightings in Maryland (or whatever state you wish). To "close-out" a species is to have seen (or heard) that species in every county in Maryland (or the state of your choice). My last close-out, Greater Yellowlegs, for example, means I've s= een a Greater Yellowlegs, sometime or other, in every county in MD. I now hav= e 83 "close-outs" (after being stuck at 77 for 5 years due to frustration a= nd health limitations) which means there are 83 species that I've seen in ev= ery county. This is pretty good, but the champ I assume is still Jim Stasz, w= ho had around 130(!) the last I heard. These and many other county-listing statistics are posted yearly by Phil Davis in the Yellowthroat, probably in the next issue. For the competitiv= e types, this is Maryland's arena to play in. I'm not particularly competitive, but I guess I have a generous sublimated instinct for hunting, and that's essentially what county-listing, especially seeking "close-outs" is. Maryland is a good state to play this game in because, with 23 counties, = all within about 3 1/2 hours drive from the center, "closing out" a species takes a lot of time and birding (What a sacrifice!), but is not overwhelm= ing or impossible, like say, Texas with something like 250 counties, or even = PA with about 60. It gives a structure to your relatively local birding when getting a life-bird or even a new state-bird has become pretty hard witho= ut traveling hundreds or thousands of miles. It also results in your becoming really familiar with every nook and cran= ny of Maryland. I doubt that there is any place in the state that I have not been within 3 miles of. And you're usually seeing some of the pleasantest places in the state. Finally, when you zero in on a "close-out" target, y= ou really, really get a feel for what the habitat, seasons, and localities o= f that species are. These listing games result in a lot of people having great fun doing a lo= t of birding while incidentally gathering data that may be of great use to science, or at least the birding knowledge-base, assuming you submit the data to an appropriate compiler (which I'll try to be better at, Marshall= , et al.) That is... Phew! County-listing is not a sin! Amen Steve Sanford tanager@bcpl.net Randallstown MD ========================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ========================================================================= ===========================================================================