Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2001 17:21:24 -0500 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Norm Saunders Subject: Re: Owl Locations MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Dianne Depuy asks: > What would a > responsible sighting report include? Could it include the town and county > (which, in this case, limits the area since only a small part of Laurel is > in Howard) or should it just be a town, or just a county, or just that it > was seen? I think it's neat that people are locating owls and sharing the information with others on MDOsprey. How much information to give though? I would limit the information to locale and county--eg. Black Hill Park, Montgomery County. This approach lets birders know places to look for owls but certainly not enough for a crowd to descend on a particular bird. Erika Wilson had a policy that she never reported owl sightings AT ALL on the Voice of the Naturalist unless they were of Snowy Owls or Short-eared Owls, both birds of open country. I'd like to hear from Lydia Schindler about how she handles this at times touchy issue now for the Voice. Let's face it, with the right techniques many owl species are relatively straightforward to locate and those techniques have been published in many places. Fran and I managed to locate a pair of Great Horned Owls and 6 Eastern Screech-Owls on the Ocean City CBC without hardly trying hard at all! I suppose what concerns me most is letting unskilled birders know about specific locations simply because the unskilled among us may also tend to be less knowledgeable about the harm they might cause. Generally speaking, when we see Long-eared Owls and Saw-whet Owls, we tell no one until long after the birds have likely moved on. We tend to be not as cautious with regard to Great Horned Owls, Screech-Owls, and Barrred Owls, but even with these I won't do more than give a very general idea of where we located them. I hope this helps, Dianne! Norm ============================= Norman C. Saunders Colesville, Montgomery County, MD marshhawk@worldnet.att.net ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================