From: Harry Armistead [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2008 6:01 PM
To: Norman Saunders
Subject: Ferry Neck, August 8-12, 2008; Whimbrel; Rachel Carson; 4-letter
abbreviations.

 

RIGBY'S FOLLY, Armistead place near Royal Oak, Talbot County, MD.  Liz &
Harry Armistead.

 

AUGUST 8-12, 2008.  5 days of clear or fair skies, low humidity, NW winds
10-15, and lovely, early fall weather, temperatures from the low-mid 70s to
low or mid 80s.  The drought continues, intensifies.  Our fields still
fallow.

 

AUGUST 8, Friday, 4 P.M. until dark only:  

 

2 Lesser Yellowlegs.  12 Snowy Egrets (at dusk, flying to the NW, perhaps to
roost at Poplar Island).  Abundant Ospreys with simultaneous counts at
various times of 13, 15, and 17.  The Ospreys are conspicuous, hanging in
the breeze, and it is impressive that so many of them are able to catch
Menhaden in spite of the choppy waters.  3 Bald Eagles.  1 migrating
American Kestrel.  42 Fish Crows.  85 feral Mallards including the 4
ducklings present now for several weeks.  The Mallards actively feed on
Wigeon Grass (Ruppia maritima), the dominant SAV plant growing on the cove
bottom.  2 Wood Ducks.

 

Non-avian taxa: 1 Fowler's Toad.  A Northern Watersnake that has captured a
large minnow.  4 Monarchs.

 

AUGUST 9, Saturday:

 

14 Ospreys in sight simultaneously. An adult male American Redstart.  A
Yellow Warbler.  A Blue-gray Gnatcatcher.  A pair of Indigo Buntings.  1
Great Egret.  1 ad. & 2 imm. Bald Eagles.  5 Eastern Kingbirds, 2 of them
juveniles.  3 Cedar Waxwings.  3 Eastern Screech-Owls (ties my yard high
count, achieved on 3 other dates, all in October; today's 3 are called up at
10 A.M. and with 2 responding at 5:30 P.M.).  1 House Wren (along with the
gnatcatcher, Yellow Warbler, and redstart, an early migrant).  24 Canada
Geese.  An ad. Bald Eagle flies right over the yard at 8:27 P.M. with an
Osprey in pursuit.  7 unID'd peep.  2 Red-tailed Hawks.  1 Yellow-billed
Cuckoo.

 

Other goodies:  Our only Marsh Hibiscus now has 2 blossoms.  1 fawn and 7
adult deer.  A dead fawn along the driveway (NOT a roadkill) has attracted 4
Turkey Vultures.  

 

Butterflies:  3 Red-spotted Purples, 2 Spicebush Swallowtails, 6 Monarchs, 3
Common Woodnymphs, 6 Cloudless Sulphurs, and a Mourning Cloak.  The Mourning
Cloak and 1 of the Red-spotted Purples as well as various colorful flies are
attending a medium-sized oak on the Olszewski Trails that has some sort of
sap seep at its base.  

 

A 3' Black Rat Snake on the Irish Creek Trail.  2 Gray Squirrels, which have
already begun to leave piles of shredded Black Walnut nuts around the yard.


 

AUGUST 10, Sunday.

 

82 Chimney Swifts, a new property high count, by 12.  Swifts are conspicuous
all 5 days.  Also joining the aerialist show are 20 Purple Martins and 30
Barn & 3 Bank swallows.  Michael & Nancy Lytell see 2 ad. and 6 young Wild
Turkeys.  2 Brown Thrashers.  1 hummingbird.  1 Yellow Warbler.  3
Diamondback Terrapin.  3 unID'd peep.  

 

BETTER TO BE CHASED THAN UNCHASTE.  An ad. Osprey engages in an extended
chase of an ad. Herring Gull near the hawk's nest.  A kingbird brings smoke
on a Turkey Vulture.

 

AUGUST 11, known to many as, simply, Monday:

 

Another, or perhaps the same, Yellow Warbler, a notorious early migrant
warbler species.  An. imm. male American Redstart.  30 Chimney Swifts.  1
Greater Yelllowlegs.  1 Cedar Waxwing.  1 imm. & 1 ad. Bald Eagle.  A female
cardinal flushes off of her nest in a Red Maple on the Warbler Trail.

 

Butterflies:  8 Cabbage Whites, 5 Common Woodnymphs, 4 Red-spotted Purples,
7 Monarchs, 1 Spicebush Swallowtail, 4 Orange Sulphurs, 1 Pearlcrescent, 1
Tiger Swallowtail, 2 Cloudless Sulphurs & 1 Painted Lady.

 

A small Five-lined Skink on the front porch, the only 1 seen this stay.  

 

AUGUST  12, Tuesday:

 

A hummingbird.  30 swifts.  Liz and I see the 2 adult Wild Turkeys and 6
poults, first seen by the Lytells on Sunday.  A Bald Eagle flies over,
causing the feral Mallards to flush, which make a noise in so doing like a
truck grating down a gravel driveway.  1 American Black Ducks.  3 Black
Vultures. 

 

Nice as all of this is, I'll be glad when fall migration begins in earnest,
or else, before that happens, to visit some hotspots where there's more to
see, such as the Delaware refuges.           

 

BROWN PELICANS: unofficial final banding results for the central Chesapeake
Bay islands.  Here is 2nd hand information on the grand totals.  The banding
season is finished.  GRAND TOTAL: 3,280 young banded at 2 localities - 2,010
at Holland Island, Dorchester County, MD; 1,270 at South Point Marsh,
Accomac County, VA (c. 2 mi. S. of Smith Island, MD).  Recently adults have
been captured at Holland Island that were banded as young birds in 2 places
in NC as well as South Point Marsh.  Interesting that they did not return to
nest at the sites where they hatched.

 

FOUR-LETTER ABBREVIATIONS.  While in the field jotting notes these save so
much time & effort.  Who wants to write Northern Rough-winged Swallow when
NRWS can do the job?  In my limited, local domain I find that 4 letters,
using the same scheme as for birds, works very well for non-bird species,
too, with only rare conflicts with those abbreviations.  So one can write
such as: SPAL, Spartina alterniflora; CNRA, Cow-nosed Ray; MONA, Monarch;
BRSN, Black Rat Snake; GRSQ, Gray Squirrel; FOTO, Fowler's Toad; SSSK,
Silver-spotted Skipper; DITE, Diamondback Terrapin; LOPI, Loblolly Pine;
BAHA, Baccharis halimifolia; SEDR. Seaside Dragonlet; MENH, Menhaden; MUSK,
Muskrat; RECE, Red Cedar, and so on .  But note that the 4-letter
abbreviations are used by the Banding Lab only for the common, English
names.  For my own notes, as you can see, I use them for the "Latin"
binomials sometimes.  

 

WHIMBREL: heroic flight continues.  Barry Truitt has news of Winnie the
Whimbrel.  Satellite radio-tagged last May 20, she took off from the VA
Eastern Shore on May 23 and flew nonstop for 6 days, 2 hours to extreme NW
Canada.  Recently she was detected in N. Alaska, then in flight S. from
Alaska out over the Pacific.  Caught up in a storm far offshore, she flew
900+ miles east in 24 hours and made landfall in Washington state at Grays
Harbor.   

 

RACHEL CARSON.  Her villification.  This is from Birdwatcher: the life of
Roger Tory Peterson (an excellent biography; Lyons Press, 2008) by Elizabeth
J. Rosenthal, p. 230: 

 

"Velsicol Chemical Company, manufacturer of heptachlor and the related
chemical chlordane, tried intimidating The New Yorker and Houghton Mifflin
into not publishing Carson's writings.  Then the company orchestrated a
meeting with Audubon officers to suggest they quit questioning the safety of
these pesticides if they knew what was good for them.  This was only the
beginning."

 

"Upon the publication of Silent Spring [1962] the National Agricultural
Chemicals Association (NACA) spent over a quarter of a million dollars to
discredit Carson.  The Manufacturing Chemists' Association also expended
considerable resources toward the same end.  She was called a spinster, a
Communist, an emotional woman, a science fiction writer - and a nonscientist
since she only had a masters degree.  NACA hired a public relations firm to
do maximum damage.  This led to the persistent anti-Carson exclamations of
an executive of American Cyanamid, Robert White-Stevens, and a former
American Cyanamid employee, Thomas Jukes."

 

Best to all. - Harry Armistead, Philadelphia.

 

  _____  

Get more from your digital life. Find out how.
<http://www.windowslive.com/default.html?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_Home2_082008>