Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2000 19:04:17 -0400 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Coskren Subject: John Brown Road MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Jane and I visited John Brown Road twice today, in the morning and in the afternoon. We struck out in the morning (the old "you should have been here earlier" tale), but the afternoon (around 3:30) was pretty good. Norm and Fran Saunders saw us pass, and caught up with us to tell us where we could find black-bellied and golden plovers, along with a buff-breast. We found the flock of plovers, and then Jane found the buff-breast, on the unharvested sod. Then three more. I looked, but there weren't four--there were five. But then we found the original(?) buff-breast, on the bare dirt near the plovers. We thought that a total of six was pretty good, until four more flew in to join the group of five. Total: ten buff-breasted sandpipers! We turned our attention back to the plovers, trying to split out the golden from the black-bellied... Until we realized that there was only one black-belly; the other fourteen were all golden plovers. Then Jane picked out a lone upland sandpiper to join the party. Our shorebirds and other species of interest included the following: American Golden Plover 14 Black-bellied Plover 1 Killdeer lots Pectoral Sandpiper several Least Sandpiper 1 Upland Sandpiper 1 Buff-breasted Sandpiper 10 Laughing Gull lots Ring-billed Gull 1 Forster's Tern 1 Great Egret 1 Little Blue Heron (imm.) 1 Horned Lark lots By the time we left, a little after 4 PM, we could no longer relocate the 9 buff-breasts, but the singleton was still there. Good luck to any who recheck! Dennis and Jane Coskren ======================================================================== To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================== ==========================================================================