Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2002 07:40:20 EDT Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Kevin Heffernan Subject: Re: Horned Grebe at Tridelphia MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit We immediately eliminated Pied Billed (by jizz) and the larger Grebes (by size). The view we had was from a distance for our scope and the head, in particular was up against a break in the bank which made for bad contrast. The contrast on the rest of the bird was adequate. We haven't completely eliminated Eared but are leaning heavily Horned for the following reasons. The bird had white sides the extent of which seemed to vary with angle, a small white rump patch, and white fore neck. The foreneck did not have a dusky throat patch. The bird did not have the raised rump. We were not able to see a clear line between the black cap and white cheek of the Horned but were also not able to see a gray cheek and white ear patch of the Eared either. The area of the cheek and the ear seemed overall white. The combination of the lack of the dusky throat patch, the lack of the raised rump and the whitish overall cheek and ear area, led us to be reasonably confident of calling it a Horned but having said that, I'd sure like to have had a better look at the head area. We had Peterson's with us when we saw the bird. After we got back to the car, we looked at Sibley's, Geo, and Kaufman. As usual there are significant differences in the views. The rump patch for example, is not shown on the Horned in Peterson's, is shown a little bit in Geo, and even more so in Sibley's and Kaufman. Kevin Heffernan Ellicott City kjheff@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 ======================================================================= =========================================================================