Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2002 18:22:05 -0500 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding <MDOSPREY@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM> Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding <MDOSPREY@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM> From: Peter Webb <pwebb@BCPL.NET> Subject: Double Western Day - 2 Western Grebes and W. Kingbird MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Double Western Day in more ways than one! It all started with a scheduled field trip to Horseheads Sanctuary south of Grasonville just east of Kent Narrows and the Bay Bridge. The group of 6 birders including co-leaders Kevin Graff and myself, Pete Webb, checked the Bayside beach overlook (Long-tailed Ducks and Buffleheads) and the Marshy Point Trail, where we were initially disappointed to find no large raft of ducks awaiting us, just a couple more Bufflehead, a couple of Ruddy Ducks, and a bird I initially glanced at and passed off as a Horned Grebe. Someone put a scope on it and thought it might be a Red-necked Grebe, longer neck and larger than a Horned Grebe. I put my Questar on it and... * (gulp! can it be?) * .. a Western Grebe! Seen well enough, sun at our backs, to see the red eye in a black cheek, black crown, white sides to the neck, with the white almost meeting behind the head narrowing the black to a very thin vertical stripe there, and the looooong neck and narrow, long head and bill. The bird, initially in the middle of the cove in front of us at the canoe landing, gradually drifted left (west) and further away, and someone remarked that they thought they saw TWO birds .. and eventually, sure enough, there were indeed TWO Western Grebes, side by side and well out into the arm of the Bay but slowly drifting back into the outer part of the cove. We found the first bird about 10:30 am, viewed the two until about 11 when I departed to try to get communications out to the rest of the world. About 11:30, another group of birders led by Fred Fallon appeared in the parking lot as my group was considering a side trip to another site, and we led them back to see one of the birds (where was the second?). About noon I left them there and took my Baltimore Six around Chestertown to Eastern Neck NWR to try our luck with the Western Kingbird I saw there last month, and which had been reported last Saturday. We arrived about 1 pm - and there it was! We watched it for about a half-hour on and off, then broke up and started for home; some of us stopped at Bogle's Wharf (still in Eastern Neck) to gawk at over 10,000 diving ducks, mostly Greater and Lesser Scaup, with some Canvasbacks and Bufflehead. The mass in the water stretched from behind land to our left, across in front of us, and around land to our right. So we had TWO Western Grebes and two species of "Western" birds in one fantastic day! Pete Webb Baltimore, Md (USA) pwebb@bcpl.net (home, after 6) pew@niroinc.com (work, 830-5 M-F) ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================