Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2003 20:40:23 -0500 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Bonnie Ott Subject: Re: Snipe/Scaup MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT > Hmmm, you must be a youngster. Hardly that! But I do have a tidbit to share (sent by Emy H.) from an article in "Birding" Magazine by David Sibley "Scaup- Identification criteria are poorly understood, and in my experience people put too much weight on one or two of their personal favorite characters. As with several other difficult species-groups, this method works fine when birds are present in numbers and when the stakes are not too high, but show most birders an individual scaup (especially immature) in an unfamiliar setting and I think the number of correct identifications will be little better than 50 percent". Interesting! Bonnie Ott Howard County Field Trip Chair Ellicott City, MD bonnie1163@comcast.net ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================