White Ibis at Liberty Reservoir Mudflats
Norm Saunders (osprey@ARI.Net)
Sun, 9 Aug 1998 13:40:29 -0500
Fran and I arrived at about 9:30 this morning (Sunday, 9 Aug 98) at
the point where Rt. 140 crosses the Liberty Reservoir. As noted by
Bob Ringler in his message of last evening, we elected to go north
on Glen Falls Rd, then walk down the hill, through the woods, to the
freshly exposed and rapidly drying mudflats. We scanned the area
thoroughly here for about 20 minutes, finding no ibis of any color.
north of Rt. 140, once more with no luck. Bob wasn't exaggerating
one little bit when he said that Rt. 140 was a busy 4-lane highway.
Anyway, as soon as we crossed over Rt. 140 to scan the reservoir
south of the bridge we almost immediately picked up the White Ibis
feeding along the Carroll County shore. Our first view of the bird
was about 200 yards south of the bridge but it fairly quickly moved
along the shoreline until it was only about 50 feet south of the
bridge, affording us really wonderful views. Then, to add a bit of
whipped cream, this most obliging bird took wing and flew over onto
the Baltimore County side of the reservoir. Thank you, sir!
The Baltimore side, alas, has a lot of hidden shoreline at this point,
so if you go to look for this bird you might need to spend a bit of
time and effort on both sides of the bridge. All the time we observed
it though it was feeding on exposed mud right at the edge of the
water.
As a nice little aside, the ibis was Fran's 300th Maryland bird! Not a
bad species at all for #300!
best,
norm
===============
Norm Saunders
Colesville, MD
osprey@ari.net