Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 07:58:48 EST Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Rick Sussman Subject: Re: American Robins; my $.02 worth MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hi all, For what it's worth, I can remember back throughout the 90's when Montgomery County was participating in the mid-winter bird count, there were a few winters in a row where the weather was severely cold during count period, with freezing rain and ice storms locking up everything. Very harsh conditions for counting birds. And I can distinctly recall searching hard for any robins at all in my area around Triadelphia Reservoir (with 4-6 very good birders looking). On one of these counts we found not a single robin, on another just one bird (during the entire day!). This winter has not been particularly cold, just lots of snow. There must be a surfeit of food around for the robins to remain here this winter. Last summers drought (preceded by the drought of the summer before) left many fruiting shrubs and plants with a huge bounty of fruit (caused by the stress to the plants) going into the autumn season, which has obviously carried over into the winter. Lucky for the birds! On a side note, I have been seeing/hearing lots of Cedar Waxwings around here in flocks with both robins and blackbirds. I even had some in my very suburban front yard last week in the snow. Maybe they were coming to the feeder for the grapes I put out... 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 ======================================================================= =========================================================================