Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2003 22:44:16 -0500 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Les Roslund Subject: Talbot County Yard Birds near Tunis Mills MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This afternoon as weather changed, my yard near Tunis Mills literally swirled with action. Several medium-sized blackbird flocks swarmed onto my feeding stations. Most were Red-wings - over 1000. One flock of 200+ Starlings stopped by briefly. Mixed in with the Red-wings were over 100 Common Grackles. (Amongst all these, I could not find a single Cowbird - I suspect some were there somewhere). The regular customers get pushed aside when these big flocks come through. But even more fun were the visitors to a feeding region that I have established beside my driveway, on the ground and backed by a trumpet vine hedge. Having just come back from a trip to town, I restocked the seed in that region, and before I retreated more than 30 paces, the takers included one Brown Thrasher, three Towhees, ten Cardinals and over 20 White-throats. Above my head in a walnut tree a flock of Cedar Waxwings got my attention via their high-pitched calls - these were joined by another flock and then another - and suddenly I realized where they were coming from. They had feeding near the top of some spruce trees, where they were finding some berries of some Japanese honeysuckle. The total flock exceed 100 birds - the biggest group of that species that I have seen on this place. Several Robins were feeding there too. What, no Juncoes? Oh yes, they were here too - a flock of over 40 were on my lawn. Would have been 41+, save for the fact that a robust Sharpie made off with one from one of my feeding sites this morning. Leeds Creek in front of my house is completely frozen, and is no longer being used by the geese, even though 1000's are present in the fields all around this neighborhood. One Great Blue Heron is still hanging around so he must be finding a little open water, and a Kingfisher was here a couple of days ago. Les Roslund Talbot County Easton, MD ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================