Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 13:08:06 -0500 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding Comments: RFC822 error: MESSAGE-ID field duplicated. Last occurrence was retained. From: Harvey Mudd Subject: waterfowl in western Maryland Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To help round out the story on waterfowl movements during the past few days, I can report that on Sunday, March 11, Marion and I visited Rocky Gap State Park in Allegheny county and two sites in eastern Garrett. At Rocky Gap in the morning, there were few waterfowl; Horned Grebe - 2 Canada Geese Gadwall - few Mallards Ring-necked Duck - several Lesser Scaup - 2 (one male; one female) Bufflehead - several Red-breasted Merganser (male) - 1 American Coot - about 6 Continuing west (about 8-10 miles into Garrett county) to Lake Meadows (about 1 mile south of Rt 68; exit 22; south on Chestnut Ridge Road) amidst the snow flurries we found the lake to be almost entirely frozen. At the south end, however, was some open water and a great concentration of waterfowl: Horned Grebe - 1 Tundra Swans - 18 Canada Geese - numerous Wood duck - 5 Mallard American Black Duck Gadwall - several American Wigeon - numerous Canvasback - numerous Redhead - numerous Ring-necked Duck - lots Lesser Scaup - numerous Buflehead - several Hooded Merganser - 10 and Ring-billed Gulls - 3 As we watched, the flock of Hooded Mergs took off and disappeared to the northeast. The Frostburg Reservoir (northwest of the Finzel exit from Rt 68) was almost entirely frozen over and only Canade Geese and one Mallard were seen at the far end hunkered down on the ice. Back at Rocky Gap in the late afternoon, there had been a noticable turnover of birds. Still at least one Horned Grebe No Canada Geese seen Mallards - few American Wigeon Ring-necked Ducks - large flock of about 40 Lesser Scaup - 2 (one male; one female) - flew while we were watching so saw wing stripe) Red-breated merganser - 1 male Hooded Merganser - 10 - ? could this have been the same group we saw leave Lake Meadows. Unfortunately we had not written down the male/female ratio in the first flock, so we could not add more evidence to help answer this question. Again while we were watching ( from a long, non-threatening distance, I might add) the Hooded Mergs and the Ring-necked Ducks took off together, circled around, then most of them disappeared to the north. All-in-all a useful lesson on how transient and changeable waterfowl are in that part of Maryland this time of the year. Harvey Mudd ____________________________________ S. Harvey Mudd NIMH/DIRP/LMB Building 36, Room 1B-08 36 CONVENT DR MSC 4034 BETHESDA MD 20892-4034 tel: 301-496-0681; fax 301-402-0245 email: shm@codon.nih.gov ========================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ========================================================================= ===========================================================================