Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2001 22:38:31 -0500 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: David Mozurkewich Subject: Spectacular DC Waterfowl Fallout In-Reply-To: <000c01c0b5ef$8407f8a0$e2032c42@s0022930182> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Many days on my way to work I stop to look for birds on the Potomac River in DC. This is from NRL between the sewage plant and the Air Force base. Most of the birds are quite predictable. Coot number between 0 and about 300, depending on whether I find the flock. DC Cormorants have been pretty stable at about 150 for the last few weeks. Gulls consist of Herring and Great Black-backed in the river and Ring-billed standing in an unused parking lot and usually number about 300 to 500 except when the conditions are just right in the winter when they can reach several thousand. Otherwise, the birding is pretty slow. 6 Osprey on three nests. A handful of Mallards, sometimes a Black Duck or two. Or a Merganser or a couple Scaup. It's not much, but when you're addicted... And besides good birds show up just often enough to make me not want to miss a morning. Never in big numbers, but show up they do. But today (26 March) was different. Between 7:30 and 8AM the water was choppy, there was quite a bit of shimmer (cold air mixing with warmer water) and the birds were on the far side of the river. As a result they were pretty hard to identify or count. My rough estimates are Bufflehead 100 Scaup sp? 200 Horned Grebe 300 wow Bonaparte's Gull 20 Gadwall 2 Long-tailed Duck 1 The Bonies were flying and were all Bonies, but there could easliy have been other species mixed in with the rafts of ducks and grebes. I went back around 12:30, hoping for calmer air and a better view. Instead, almost all the birds were gone. I am familiar with this type of early morning spectacle among passerines during migration, but this is the first time I stumbled across a waterfowl fallout like this. Sure, I see the occasional odd duck knocked down to the local pond by a spite of bad weather; today it's the numbers that surprise me. And if the front went through last night, it was dry. So why did these birds drop out of the sky and how widespread was the event? Dave David Mozurkewich Seabrook, PG MD USA mozurk@bellAtlantic.net ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================