Date: Sat, 27 Jan 2001 23:14:01 EST Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Todd Day Subject: Frederick and Montgomery Counties, 27 Jan 2001 Comments: cc: Icepeep@aol.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit All... Bob Abrams and I co-lead a Fairfax Audubon trip to the Frederick and Montgomery today. The morning started out pretty cloudy and mile, with calm winds. Around midmorning the wind picked up and remained steady at 15 plus miles per hour, and blowing steady at 20 or more in late afternoon. The temperature hovered around forty degrees. Highlights included the snowy owl along Oland Road, seen in late afternoon. A thousand or so horned larks were along Oland Road in two big groups. One group of birds was following around the manure that was being spread along New Design Road, the other group was further down Oland Road, flying in circular laps, letting the wind blow them back to their starting point. We paid our dues to the wind and concentrated on the group of larks away from New Design Road. Among those birds were ten to twelve snow buntings, and six lapland longspurs. A barred owl was seen well in a hollow tree at Lilipons. Lilipons also hosted eighteen tree sparrows and twenty wild turkeys. Black Hills Park had seven common goldeneyes, hundreds of canvasbacks, one pintail, a five American wigeon, a hundred or so ring-necked ducks, a dozen hooded mergansers, one common merganser, ten ruddy ducks, nineteen tundra swans; no sign of the harlequin duck. Raptors at various locations totaled five kestrels, four red-shouldered hawks, one harrier, seven red-tailed hawks [one enjoying a recently killed bird], and one coopers hawk. Cheers... Todd - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Todd M. Day Jeffersonton, VA Culpeper County BlkVulture@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 ======================================================================= =========================================================================