Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 02:33:48 -0400 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Phil Davis Subject: MD/DC Records Committee: Off-line for awhile ... gone birding !!! Comments: To: BRCF-L@listserv.indiana.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed MDOsprey and Bird Records Committee Forum - I'll be off-line for about five weeks and unable to respond to any queries regarding the MD/DC Records Committee. If anyone has any questions, Harvey Mudd, the Committee Chair, is currently out of the country but will return from Indonesia and Australia sometime the week of September 4th. His e-mail address is shm@codon.nih.gov. (Ask him if he was successful in finding the bird, the "Plains Wanderer", in Australia!). Committee member Marshall Iliff (MIliff@aol.com) is currently on-line and knows the committee database by heart. I will return the week of October 2nd. Barbara and I will be in Attu for the month of September for the last Attours trip ever to the island. After 25 years of organizing birding trips to Attu, Larry Balch is calling it quits. As late as 1998, the Attu US Coast Guard LORAN station was to close in December 2000 due to the deployment of GPS, meaning an end to use of the runway. Even though a change of plans will now keep the station operating until 2008, the Attu "camp" is just taking too much effort to maintain, so Larry decided that this would be the last year. Over the 25 years of Attours birding excursions to the Island, this is only the fourth autumn trip. We are excited about the prospect of some great fall birds, especially with some hold over La Nina conditions in the Bering Sea. We don't leave until mid-day on Wednesday, but I'm starting the process of "no mailing" all of my listservers. If anyone is interested in following the progress of our trip, here's a URL and paragraph from a note I sent to some of our family and friends ... Attours Fall 2000 Daily Reports: http://www.attu.com/fall00.htm Attours says: "Every few days, we will fax a report of our bird sightings that someone has volunteered to put on our web site. Sometimes this doesn't happen right away." The Attours reports typically also include any problems (weather, logistics, etc.) we might be having. Note: during some years communications and other problems have kept reports from being posted until we get back, but it's still worth checking every few days in you're interested in how things are going. [You might need to hit your browser's "refresh" button when you check, if it's not set to automatically refresh]. Initially, there are dummy report links on this page and as reports are posted the date of the report will be shown on the link. An "advance party" will arrive on the island about four days ahead of us, so there may be a report posted even before we get there on September 2nd. Phil ================================== Phil Davis Davidsonville, Maryland USA mailto:PDavis@ix.netcom.com ================================== ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================