Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 19:35:53 -0500 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Wanda Cole Subject: Atlasing for owls pays off/Mill Creek Sanctuary Comments: cc: lroslund@bluecrab.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Mill Creek Sanctuary is "across the highway" from where I live so I am atlasing four of the Wye Mills blocks. A couple weekends ago I spent 3 hours walking through MCS to look for promising cavities and evidence of nests from previous years. I was also looking for Delmarva Fox Squirrel. I flushed an adult bald eagle, perched, not nesting, in the southeast portion of the property, observed a red-tail circling overhead, and watched a pileated destroying the bark on one particular tree. It has also worked the bark on a tree over the footbridge near the parking lot. Interestingly, I noticed a mature popular tree whose main trunk was so riddled with rows of woodpecker drillings, that it looked more like the bark of a different species. Last nite, not long before midnite, I decided to do some owling. I figured that if I was an owl, the end of two nites of rain and a bright-despite-the-fog sky would be a good time to go hunting. Or at least a reason to celebrate. Sure enough, my first stop produced an eastern screech calling from the row of pine trees that line the road in front of the future Dolvin Farms subdivision (next to MCS). I thought I heard another reply- only once- from an area farther back. My last stop was at the MD 662 crossing over Mill Creek. Calling north of the bridge were two GHOWs- the female first with her more verbose series of notes, the male with his shorter reply. (Reminds me of human conversation.) It was hard to pick out the calls with the constant but variable drone of US 50 traffic, the escalating and cascading calls of the spring peepers, and the sound of water passing under the roadway. The calls were consistently low and repeated at steady intervals, and eventually the peepers quieted down enough for me to know for sure. It's amazing how much we miss by living indoors at nite. As I was owling, I watched possums, racoons, deer and fox go by with not too much concern for my presence. A great blue heron in a tree squawked its objection to my parking near its roost. Canadas cackled on a pond, cattle bellowed, fox barked, many frogs sang out, and you could hear the movement of water through the soil nearby. At home, the robins, cardinals, mourning doves, song sparrows, grackles, redwings, starlings, house finches, and house sparrows are singing on territory, doing courtship display and/or nest building. The killdeer complain as they scurry about in the night. The white-crowned sparrows are still here as are a couple juncos. I haven't seen the fox sparrow for a while. The tree swallows should be appearing at their nest boxes any day now and the purple martins should arrive on or about March 25th. Time to get the martin housing cleaned, repaired and made ready! A downy visited my yard this week- a yard first. This is exciting for me, for 12 years ago the yard was devoid of anything meaningful, save a few blades of malnourished grass. Some of my neighbors laughed at my rows of "State Highway" flags that marked the locations of my tiny little trees. Now I have lots of shade, privacy, wind protection, and my yard is the Grand Central Station for wildlife. Wanda Cole pacificthunder@hotmail.com _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp. ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================