Karen:

I am surprised but pleased to hear the folks at GBBC (Cornell) have a regional 
coordinator to ask about the GBBC reports that are submitted.  There are 
usually some highly questionable reports that are submitted every year, 
presumably due to a simple misidentification (i.e., raven v. crow), or else 
someone being careless and entering their number observed in the wrong 
square on the form.  From my feeder experience, you've got extraordinary 
counts for both PUFI (19)  and AMGO (150); I've never seen that many of 
either finches at a feeder, and I would gladly trade some of your 100+ finches 
for some of our 100's of marauding blackbirds, grackles and cowbirds!!

BTW, I checked MD's 2008 reports for the GBBC, and MD did very well this 
year (138 species).  As mentioned above, the number of ravens reported is 
probably way off (67 birds, from 20 locations - at least half of the locations 
have probably no documented ravens observed; I know they seem to be 
expanding their MD range, but its not to this extent).  I wonder if the GBBC 
regional reviewers are aware of this aspect of concern, and if so I wonder 
what their threshold is (it should only be one bird, for any reported species 
that is not normally present or found in certain geographic locations).

On the other hand, there are probably quite a few great (interesting) birds 
that do get observed and reported to GBBC, that never get posted on 
MDOsprey.  For example, a few interesting MD birds reported this year:

96 different localities with reports of purple finches! (585 birds)
19 different localities with reports of pine siskins (116 birds)
4 different reports of snow buntings from PG County! (12 birds)
1 report of lapland longspur from PG County (2 birds)

Also, two interesting MD celebrity birds that were not reported but I think may 
have been observed this weekend are the WWCR and PABU.

Where I live has been pretty slow in terms of recent bird movement.  
However, yesterday's weather seemed to stir up some change - I saw 3 
species at our house that I had missed for the entire GBBC period (4 days) 
last weekend (Purple Finch, YB Sapsucker, A. Tree Sparrow).

Let's hope this week's weather brings in some more excitement!
Jeff Shenot
Croom MD