Date: Thu, 8 Aug 2002 19:12:54 EDT Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Rick Sussman Subject: Re: Triadelphia this afternoon, WILSON'S PHALAROPE Comments: To: voice@capaccess.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hi all, sorry for the late post, but: Another good bird showed up this afternoon at Triadelphia Reservoir, at the Greenbridge Rd. fire road area above Brighton Dam. While scanning the mudflats between 4:50 P.M. and about 5:40 P.M. I located a juvenile WILSON'S PHALAROPE which was actively preening most of the time, in the first cove on the left as you come out of the woods and look up the reservoir (to the left). When I first got to the shore, I set up my scope and scanned all of the exposed mudflats visible from this point. All I could find were some Killdeer, Spotted Sandpipers, and some peeps on the far off second point of land upriver. Even at 60X these were barely discernible. After scanning around the reservoir a few times, I had about given up finding anything good, when I focused on a bird in fairly close, preening on the nearest shore. I moved in closer twice for better looks. The bird was only slightly smaller than a Killdeer which passed behind it. It had a dark eye-line, white supercillium and white from the throat to the undertail coverts. It had a white rump, very visible when it preened. Its back was dark brown with all the back feathers emarginated in a beige/buff edge. It had yellow"ish"/light legs (definitely not dark), a dark brownish crown, and a thin, dark (blackish) slender bill, and a wash of light gray from the back of the eye area to the bend of the wing. For those looking for this bird, it looked most like the illustration on p. 185 in the new Nat'l Geo guide (listed as "juvenile") but with the gray wash like the illustration below it of a molting juvenile. It had flown when I left, scared off by a group of kids walking up the shore to fish, but before they closed in, it had moved up the weedy hill, feeding along the way and flew while I had the scope on it. Before I could raise my binoculars, it was gone, so I don't know if it headed up river, across or down river, but Pigtail in Howard County was directly across the river (hint, Hans...) and a likely spot to search. Hope it stays, 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 ======================================================================= =========================================================================