Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2001 15:48:38 -0400 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Steve Sanford Subject: Nice yard bird! ...and some others MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit After a good morning's birding with Pete Webb I returned home around 2:45 PM for a nap. As I got out of the car, I saw a raptor soaring above at medium height and assumed it was just another Red-tail. On closer inspection though I noticed it's wings seemed rather massive and square, the body overall was a uniform medium-brown, and, look, there are big white marks in the center of the wings, and the inner half of the tail is white. And the tail projects out considerably more than the head. And look, it's bigger than the nearby Red-tail. Good Lord, it's a Golden Eagle. Over my house! I called Pete and told him what I saw and that it might be drifting eastward in his direction. Unfortunately for him, though, it circled and soared to great heights for about 5 minutes and then headed south. That, of course, was the best part of MY birding day, but the morning was nice too. We first birded off Queen Anne's Road near Pete's house in Lochearn, Baltimore County. Early on we saw an immature White-crowned Sparrow, the first of the season for both of us, and quite uncommon in our area. We also saw Swamp, White-throated, Chipping and Field Sparrows, a gaggle of 5 male Eastern Towhees, both kinglets, mainly Ruby-crowned, and we heard a Winter Wren doing it's beautiful, song -- full-throated -- several times. We decided we better check this area out more often. We then went down to Kinder Farm Park in AA County and had the same sparrows, including a White-crowned, and great gobs of Ruby-crowned Kinglets. We saw a late Broad-winged Hawk soaring there. We even sighted Norm and Fran Saunders. Later we joined with Sue Ricciardi. She mentioned that she had also seen a few Savannah Sparrows and some Meadowlarks there. Steve Sanford tanager@bcpl.net Randallstown MD Baltimore County Come on Goshawk! ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================