Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 08:46:27 -0400 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Henry Armistead <74077.3176@COMPUSERVE.COM> Subject: Barren Island, pelicans. MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii "Toadfest 2001" on June 7 at Rigby's Folly, Ferry Neck, Talbot County. 4 or 5 inches of rain this week. It's a swamp everywhere. Lots of Fowler's Toads hopping around and calling plus a few Spring Peepers. Trees in our yard are now big enough so that we have apparently lost Orchard Orioles as breeders but gained a pair of Red-eyed Vireos. June 8: Stan Arnold's June 6 MDOSPREY post captured beautifully the fecundity and excitement of June. I couldn't agree more with his view that this is a terrific time of year to be afield and that more of us should do it more often. Part of his day was spent along Egypt Road. My drive down Egypt today, non-stop, nonetheless produced pretty good views of meadowlarks, Grasshopper Sparrows, and Horned Larks plus a Red Fox and 2 deer. Blackwater N.W.R. A quick pass along Wildlife Drive with a few stops = 3 Fox Squirrels and 119 Great Egrets. It wasn't picked up by the wire services but Levin Willey continues to achieve big heron counts at dusk here at Pool 3, where on May 4 (for the archival record) he saw 12 Glossy Ibis, 204 Great, 49 Snowy and 7 Cattle Egrets coming in to roost in the extensive willow copse plus 2 moorhens. This week volunteers, mostly from the National Aquarium at Baltimore and Blackwater N.W.R., have planted 100,000 sets of "Spartina alterniflora" in an 11 acre marsh restoration area consisting of dredge spoil back of geotubes on Barren Island, which is now a unit of the refuge, c. 1 mile offshore of Hooper's Island. At one point I counted 115 people at work on this. Funny to see all these folks in the marsh, splattered with mud, wearing name tags. Congressman Wayne Gilchrest was present along with dignitaries representing offices of other politicians, the aquarium, the refuge, NOAA, the Army Corps of Engineers, the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the U. S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and other outfits, and who gave brief talks while journalists and photographers made note of it all. There's a big Great Blue Heron and Great Egret colony here, in the midst of which is also one of the few known locations in the state for Eastern Narrow-mouthed Toads, which utter a very strident, bleating call that is quite distinctive. The Spartina project is not in one of the better birding parts of the island but I did see at least 4 Bald Eagles, 35 Brown Pelicans, and 7 Boat-tailed Grackles. The big Red Admiral flight continues. We saw several here today. I found Barn Swallow nests and stubby-tailed juvenile Carolina Wrens just barely able to fly in one of the sheds adjacent to what's left of the hunt club. An Osprey nest is on top of the rubble of the old hunt club lodge. Barren Island still has forests large enough to support breeding Pine Warblers. Rep. Gilchrest is a friend of the Bay. A look at his website is quite heartening: http://www.house.gov/gilchrest/ Off the south tip of the main part of Barren is a marshy islet where Brown Pelicans have begun constructing nest platforms. 200 were seen here June 5 by Jim McCann, a third or more of them adults, and c. 15 nest platforms were found. A recent informal e-mail from Dave Brinker says there are (his totals were preliminary and unofficial, from memory) c. 822 Brown Pelican nests in the southern part of Smith Island (where he and his entourage banded 416 chicks on June 7) and 132 on Spring Island (counted June 4 by Jim McCann; this is yet another unit of Blackwater and in Dorchester County) plus 15 or so adults hanging around Bodkin Island (Queen Annes County), where they constructed nest platforms last year and where a white pelican has also been present. On last Dec. 27 I found one of Dave's banded pelicans on the beach at Cape Hatteras that had been banded at Smith in July 2000. Also of interest: Dave counted 570 Royal Tern eggs on Skimmer Island at Ocean City on June 6 and in the Bay Royals are nesting again at Fox Island in between Tangier I. and the mainland in Virginia. Many thanks to Dave Brinker for sharing all this fascinating colonial waterbird data. On the way home to Philadelphia today alongside Route 301 at mile 116.1, east shoulder, a roadkill Beaver. This is 2.3 miles south of the Beaver dam mentioned in several of my posts earlier this spring. How sad for such a fine animal to come to this end. Furry and fat even in death. Drive carefully. Even a refuge can have deadly traffic and I saw a d.o.r. cottontail right next to the "toll booth" at Blackwater at the entrance to Wildlife Drive. Best to all and have a great breeding season, as it were.-Harry Armistead, 523 E. Durham St., Philadelphia, PA 19119. ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================