Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2002 18:47:00 -0400 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Sherry Peruzzi Subject: Possible Western Kingbird? MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT My husband and I were birding at the Patuxent Research Refuge North Tract today. Just to the south of the Wildlife Viewing Area pond there's a gravel road that leads back to a wetland. Just beyond the fork in that road, on the left, there's an open area with a copse of trees behind it. In the open area are a few small saplings. The bird we saw was sitting on a sapling branch, hawking insects from time to time and occasionally changing to a different sapling. We got excellent looks at it at relatively close range. There were a couple of Eastern Phoebes in the same area, so we were able to compare them. This bird was larger, and its general shape was more like a kingbird. Its belly was a brighter yellow than the phoebes, and its head was much lighter gray with a wide dark eyeline. The cheek just below the eyeline was white, and the breast and throat were very pale gray. The black tail was comparatively shorter than the phoebes', and there was a very noticeable white stripe running down the length of the tail on both sides. It did not pump its tail at all during the several minutes we watched it until it flew into the copse of trees. It also didn't have the "smudges" on the sides of the breast that Sibley describes phoebes having, but rather was very light right up to the edge of the wing, which was dark. After much discussion we both think that, as unlikely as it seems, this might well be a Western Kingbird. The WEKI that was at Fort McHenry last spring was last reported on the Osprey list in June; could this be the same bird? I hope someone can find this bird and confirm the sighting, or suggest what else it could be with those field marks. It definitely wasn't an Eastern Phoebe, nor was it an Eastern Kingbird, and searching through both Kaufmann's and Sibley's we didn't see anything else that looked like the bird we saw. Hopefully, Sherry Peruzzi & Ken Board Columbia, MD ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================