Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 22:10:20 -0400 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Rob Gibbs Subject: Re: Vesper Sparrows MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit We had nesting (or at least singing and chasing) vesper sparrows in a large soybean field North of Germantown about a month ago. It occured to me at the time that these row crop fields, particularly in early summer, are very similar to the preferred habitat of many field birds - that being low sparse vegetation with lots of bare soil. It seems to me that birds often focus on habitat structure rather than plant species present. I was reminded of this about a week ago when I found hooded warblers (an uncommon breeder in Mont. Co) with young in a wooded area that was one of the saddest excuses for a forest you'd want to see - the canopy trees were OK but the entire understory was exotic invasives mostly multiflora rose. But it served the birds needs structurally. -- Rob Gibbs Damascus, MD robgibbs@starpower.net Rick Sussman wrote: > In a message dated 7/18/2001 8:32:47 PM Eastern Daylight Time, > mozurk@BELLATLANTIC.NET writes: > > > corn fields are the > > habitat you want to check to find breeding Vesper Sparrows in this part of > > > > Interestingly, the only Vesper Sparrow I've ever had in Montgomery County was > seen in a cornfield, but, alas, it was in October! I was checking for Conn. > Warblers, which are also said to like this sort of edge-scrub habitat > provided by cornfields, so don't give up looking there! > > Rick Sussman > Ashton,MD > warblerick@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 > ======================================================================= ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================