Date: Tue, 28 May 2002 10:59:27 -0400 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Peter Webb Subject: W-King odd pairing? Late nesting YCNH's MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Instead of going to work this morning, I took a quick visit to Ft. McHenry to see the Western Kingbird there. As previously posted by others, I saw it chasing a male Eastern Kingbird over the marsh, saw it in its favorite Sycamore, and saw it on the fence which surrounds the actual origional Ft. McHenry earthworks. I also saw an Eastern Kingbird next to the Western on the fence which it was NOT chasing away and suspect it was a female, and that in the absence of any Western females the Western male, more aggressive than the Eastern male(s), may have attracted this bird for a mate. It will be interesting to see if in fact this is a cross-pairing and if they successfully nest. In another topic, there was a question raised about Yellow-crowned Night-herons and whether they would re-nest if a storm blew down their first nest; Elliot Kirschbaum indicated that a few years ago a downed nest was not replaced. I had the experience a few years ago of having YCNH's nest over my house; the first year the pair showed up at the beginning of JUNE, well after their normal arrival date of end of March/beginning of April. The following two years, the pair arrived around the first of April. I believe that when a nesting attempt fails, they try re-nesting elsewhere. This year, a pair turned up at the neighbor's yard a couple of weeks ago; I believe the same thing happened there. 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 ======================================================================= =========================================================================