That is very interesting, great find!  I was going to post but was too busy until now, that I did the same thing last Tuesday eve, looking for Dickcissels etc on my way home from work.  Except I didn't see or hear any!  I spent an hour looking along the same road, from about 0.4 mile south of Westphalia Rd, south to where Melwood Rd's fields end (~0.9 miles).  I also looked on Moores Way (adjacent to Melwood) plus a couple other promising areas near Upper Marlboro (large old fields on private land/farm lanes).  Weather was warm but perfect.  I found no Dickcissels, but had plenty of field birds including 5 meadowlarks and several Grasshopper Sparrows (both are getting very scarce in PG now), plus an abundance of the usuals.  It's spectacularly nice habitat for PG County, or anywhere - like taking a step back in time.

My comment here is this is a very beautiful area, or was?  It was part of an old BBS route (Cheltenham, I think) that I did with Danny Bystrak a few years ago, and it was very different then.  We had a Warbling Vireo at the stream crossing there, which I came back to later and "upgraded" since it was during the Breeding Bird Atlas.  A good find for PG County.  I think back in the 90s for a while one season, Danny told me there was a Henslow's Sparrow on territory there too.  The really weird thing I noticed last week, is THERE WERE NO PEOPLE.  The last timej I checked here was 2 years ago to look for quail, and the houses were lived in then and the farms were being farmed.  Nearly the entire area has been abandoned now; the houses and farms there are boarded up (many have broken windows) and I only saw 2 that had people living there.  It's a ghost town, very weird.  It's as if the goverment shut it down and moved everyone out.  Does anyone know what is going on there?

If you go to look for Dickcissel (I will today!), be aware that it is a narrow road that gets a fair amount of traffic (at least during the week), and there is no shoulder and very few places to pull off.

Cheers-
Jeff Shenot
Croom MD

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