Date: Sun, 12 Oct 2003 21:07:32 EDT Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Rick Sussman Subject: Montgomery County Big Sit preliminary results MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hi all, The Sitting Ducks of Montgomery County (remember it was only last year when the snipers had us all afraid to go outside...) tallied 55 species (46 last year) at Black Hill Regional Park, although when I left at about 6:30 PM Jim Green was still sitting and counting, after more than 12 hours there! GO JIM!! Some of our best finds were a late Green Heron, 4 Common Loons flying over, 3 Pied-billed Grebes, a good selection of raptors including many Sharpies and Coopers, Red-shouldered and tailed, both A. Kestrel and a single flyby Merlin, and a late Osprey, a single Tree Swallow, Blue-headed Vireo, both kinglets, DC Cormorant, Wood Ducks, Killdeer, YB Sapsucker (in fact all the woodpeckers except Red-headed). Biggest miss (imho) was Song Sparrow, but we did get White-throated. A lingering dragonfly turned out to be a Halloween Pennant, according to Denise Gibbs, appropriate for the season and very pretty. Lots of fly-over Monarchs still. Sitters included the aforementioned Mr. Green (who brought his grill and bratwursts), Bob Hartman, Cynthia and Tony Meade, Linda Friedland, Clive Harris, Janet Millenson, Rob and Denise Gibbs, and Gemma Radko, and myself who provided Dunkin' Donuts and coffee and would have been sitting longer had the donut shop opened earlier than 6AM! All in all a very lovely day to be outside doing the hard work of counting birds while sitting on your butt! Lets hear some early reports from the other circles, 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 ======================================================================= =========================================================================