Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2003 08:49:30 -0500 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: "Lovelace, Glen" Subject: Oak Grove (Sussex/Caroline Co.) Area Ducks Comments: To: DE-Birds MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Hello All, I must be the only person without a Red-necked Grebe to report. Nevertheless, I did find a lot of ducks on inland puddles. Starting on 2/28, I searched a few puddles on the way home from work. The highlight was 5 Wood Ducks on a puddle (actually a small wetland) on Oak Rd, south of Gully Camp (and east of Bridgeville for those not up on obscure Sussex Co. place names). Apple Tree Rd had approx 10k Snow Geese in the fields where the longspur had been. On 3/1, made a brief stop along Oak Grove Rd. The puddle on the north side of the road just west of the state line had ~250 Pintail, 12 Mallard and 1 A. Wigeon. I was excited because the previous high on my homelist for Pintail was 10 and this was the second record for Wigeon. But this was a mere warm-up for Sunday. On 3/2, first stop at Oak Grove was the puddle at the corner of Kinder Rd and N. Oak Grove Rd (can be seen from either road). It held 55 Pintail, 6 Black Duck (2nd record) and 5 GW Teal plus both geese and swan milling around the area. I could not see the puddles at the sharp bend in Kinder Rd due to a snow fog hanging over this field. I then went back to the puddle on Oak Grove Rd. Only 3 Pintail. But there were 103 swan in the puddle closer to the abandoned yellow house. Eventually I noticed more ducks well back in the puddle opposite the house. This one had 46 Pintail, 3 A. Wigeon, more Mallard and 2 Gadwall (new homelist record). I still wanted to walk to the back of the farm, but I was not about to do that in the rain. So I set out about 4 PM, waded through water within an inch of the top of my boots (about as deep as I have ever seen here) and found a huge flock of ducks in the puddle the was shrouded from view in the morning. The Pintail were too concentrated to attempt a count, but the impression was more birds than the previous day's flock (300-400?). There were more Mallard than I had seen all day, 9 A. Wigeon and 2 Black Duck. Who knows what I missed as I had carried only binos and was at a bad angle to the setting sun. Before I had a chance to wade out and drive around to Kinder Rd, the entire group left :(. To put this in perspective, I had 9 species of waterfowl in one day when the best for any previous year was 7 species. I also found a Red-Shouldered Hawk on the farm and a Chipping Sparrow in a flock of Juncos on Horseshoe Rd. 9 new species for the year over the weekend. Up to 64 for the year and way ahead of a normal pace as that level is usually reached in late March. Good Birding, Glen Lovelace III Seaford, DE ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================