Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2000 21:41:02 EDT Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Marshall Iliff Subject: Assateague birds today (incl. lots of Sandwich Terns) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit MDOsprey, Before heading out on tomorrow's FONT pelagic trip (tonight I go to b ed with dreams of tropicbirds and Sabine's Gulls...), I wanted to make a qui ck post. After a fairly dull dawn flight at Bayside campground (1 Prothonot ary Warbler, 1 Yellow-throated Warbler, 3 American Redstart, 2 Black-and-whit e Warbler...) Jim Stasz and I drove down Assateague in the O.R.V. zone toda y. Best bird was a Marbled Godwit (new for the comp list, yes?) at Fox Hill Levels along with 14 other species of shorebirds. One flyover Whimbrel w as also notable there. The highlight for us was an incredible number of Sandwich Terns on th e beach. Scattered from crossover #10 (about 6 mi south of the pavement) t o the state line we counted about 350 Royal Terns, 40 Caspian Terns, and 60 small sternas we counted 63 (!) Sandwich Terns. 12 or so of the Sandwich were feeding offshore, another dozen were scattered along the beach, whil e the bulk came from the two large tern flocks which had 15 and 23 Sandwich respectively. Maybe Mark can enlighten us on the previous state high coun t, but I'll be surprised if any other state count comes close (16 comes to m ind as the previous high). The previous week Jim and Matt Hafner counted 23 using the same method, but that included 6 at Eagle's Nest Flats which we re completely submerged today at 2:30 p.m.. We didn't visit Skimmer I.. Relatively few migrants around today in toto but an interesting flock was spished up from a cornfield. Among others, it included 1 American Redsta rt, 1 Prothonotary Warbler, 1 Yellow-throated Warbler, 1 Orchard Oriole, 1 Baltimore Oriole, 3 Blue-gray Gnatcatchers, and 1 Eastern Wood-Pewee. A nearby wood edge had 3 Summer Tanager and 1 Scarlet Tanager. We had two other Prothonotary Warblers at other locations - surprisingly late I thou ght. Wish us luck tomorrow.... Best, Marshall Iliff miliff@aol.com ======================================================================== To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================== ==========================================================================