Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 18:57:25 -0400 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Shireen Gonzaga Subject: Close Encounters of the Tanager Kind (Was Re: Mall birds, May 3 ) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > From Jim Felley > ...Scarlet Tanager, who inspected me from as close > a 12 feet, and repeatedly sang while I watched ... it > occurred to me that I was wearing a red golf shirt and > black pants. Perhaps he thought I was the biggest, > weirdest tanager he'd ever seen, but since I wasn't > singing, he figured I was not a threat. That happened to me too. A few years ago, I was parked on San Martin Drive (being a traffic hazard)-- it's a narrow winding street on the Johns Hopkins University campus in Baltimore. There was a good reason ... I was doing some surveillance of a big mysterious nest in the woods that a co-worker had reported to me, with a funny-looking grey tail sticking out. After a few hours of observation, I realized I was staring at a Yellow-crowned Night Heron's butt. Anyhow, back to the Scarlet Tanager. While I was sitting in the car monitoring the mysterious nest, he came up to me, so close I could not focus my binoculars on him. It must have been about the same distance as Jim's encounter. The little guy looked very puzzled, cocking his head a lot and cautiously hopping closer and closer while I quietly talked to him. After about 10 minutes or so, he got bored and flew off. Well, my surveillance vehicle was a RED Toyota Tercel, easily mistaken for a big ugly Scarlet Tanager, I suppose. :-) Oh, as long as I'm here, I have to confess to a major dumb birding moment this morning. While walking from the overflow parking lot to the office (which yielded a Blackburnian last week), I noticed some action high in the trees. I got the binoculars out and saw something with a black throat. A co-worker walking by asked me what I had. "Probably a Black-throated Green Warbler," I said with some authority. Good thing he walked away impressed. A few minutes later, my Black-throated Green turned into a frisky House Sparrow. Warbler-fever ... do they have a drug for that? cheers, shireen -- Shireen Gonzaga Baltimore, MD whimbrel@home.com ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================