Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2004 08:37:44 -0500 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: John Churchill Subject: Mute Swan - Allegany County Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Hello MD Birders, I hadn't seen any other post about this yet so I thought I'd take care of it. Ray Kiddy and I have seen this bird off and on for the past couple of weeks (I'm hoping he will put up some photos that should positively ID the bird). The first time we saw it was 2/14. I was driving up to the Cumberland Terminus and saw that Ray was already there. He started waving and pointing when he saw that I was driving up. I stopped driving and grabbed my binoculars long enough to see a big white swan with a black bill flying away. I think we both noted it as being a Tundra Swan at this point. The next time I ran into Ray at the terminus (we seem to bump into each other here quite frequently) was on 2/22. At that time he mentioned that he had seen it up the river (from behind the Moose Lodge) and that it showed characters more consistent with Mute Swan. We decided to go take a closer look and while we were looking we decided to photograph it to show to a few experts. One anonymous reviewer raised the Hybrid question. One of them (we will just call him 'Marshall' to preserve his anonymity) said that it was a full Mute Swan (probably a 2nd year immature). It had a mostly black bill with a knob on top and some dis-colored feathers on the upperparts (indicating an immature). The tail was long-ish and the neck often showed a bit of a curve to it. The bill was not the right shape for a Tundra Swan at all having a sort of right angle at the bottom where it meets the head instead of angling up towards the eye (in other words the black area between the bill and the eye was feathered (not part of the bill) and the bill had a knob on it on the top part of the bill. Sorry about getting the information out there late but we were tentative about the ID of the bird since it was an odd plumage (and because we just don't see a lot of swans out this way). There is also some question about where the bird came from which I'd hate to be the one to raise since I hope (plan?) to count it for my Allegany County list (currently 233 with the Mute Swan, 232 without). J.B. Churchill Frostburg, MD ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================