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Subject:

Common Teal and other Lower Shore highlights--1/29/2011

From:

Ronald Gutberlet

Reply-To:

Ronald Gutberlet

Date:

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 21:39:36 -0500

Hi Everyone,

I spent the day (29 Jan 2011) in Somerset and Worcester Counties trying to add a few more year birds before the end of January.  I started in Somerset and ended in Worcester.  At my first Worcester stop (Truitt's Landing), I ran into Doug Ruby and we birded together for the rest of the day.  Plenty of fun, and a few highlights:

The marshes near Rumbley produced two year birds, MARSH WREN and SEASIDE SPARROW.  Earlier visits here this month yielded American Bittern, Black-crowned Night-Heron, and Boat-tailed Grackle.  The third try for Seaside Sparrow finally paid off!

At Truitt's Landing, Doug and I had nice scope views of the COMMON TEAL that was found earlier this year by Mike Burchett and Betsy Bangert--awesome bird!  While the views were great, my digiscopes are more in the neighborhood of adequate.  We also saw one NELSON'S SPARROW at the end of the road.

At Vaughn Central (accessed from Rt 12), we found my first LESSER YELLOWLEGS of the year with 15 Greater Yellowlegs and 3 Dunlin.  On the walk out to the marsh, we had a single RUSTY BLACKBIRD in one of the corn stubble fields along with many Eastern Bluebirds, Savannah Sparrows, American Goldfinches, and an EASTERN PHOEBE that Doug picked out.  Four sharp-tailed sparrows in the marsh remained frustratingly unidentified.

We ended the day with some seawatching from Assateague and then the Ocean City Inlet but didn't add anything unusual.  During my few years in Salisbury, I have come to take Northern Gannet for granted in January--just drive to the beach and look out to sea.  Well, it looks like I'll be finishing January 2011 without a gannet.  Hmm...

But I can't complain, the Lesser Yellowlegs was MD year bird number 163, and tomorrow is Sunday!

Have fun,

Ron Gutberlet
Salisbury, MD
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