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Re: Hummingbird in Cecil County

From:

Maryanne Dolan

Reply-To:

Maryanne Dolan

Date:

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 07:04:27 -0400

Yes, and I'm sill annoyed about it.  The bird was spotted on a Monday
afternoon by a homeowner familiar with hummers.  She has numerous feeders
and likes to watch them in action.  She immediately spotted the rarity.
(Well, who wouldn't?  The little critter's blue!) The homeowner is not a
birder and so went online to find advice.  I didn't hear about it until
Thursday morning.  Since the home is located less than 10 minutes from my
house, I sped down there.  The bird had not been seen since the previous
evening. If it's still around, it's not been sighted.

I spent a great deal of time talking to the homeowners.  Both are very
pleasant people, who downright enjoyed visitors and sharing the bird.  There
was a real problem with access.  The house is located on a narrow country
road. The homeowners were understandably concerned about their neighbors.
But that was their only concern.  They were pleased with the attention and
enjoyed the visitors.  They even put out a visitor's book.

I am annoyed because many more people could have seen the bird.  Had anyone
contacted me (president of the club), I could have done earlier what I did
on Thursday morning:  Go down to access the situation. And yes, see the
bird, too.  I am, after all, a birder.  But having met the friendly
homeowners, anyone with local knowledge could immediately see a way to alert
birders and protect the homeowners.   There is a large restaurant parking
lot right down the road.  A golf course with an even larger parking lot sits
across the road from the restaurant. There is a mini strip mall right up the
road with lots of available parking.  We could have car pooled folks in from
any of the those locations.  Three to four cars could park at the house.  It
was doable and since I am retired, I would have been happy to coordinate
it.

I don't know if my solultion would have worked, but it would have been nice
to try it.  A major problem with this incident is that the bird simply
wasn't here long enough to do much of anything.  Word didn't get out until
Tuesday and it was gone by Wednesday evening.

Pat Valdata suggested we ask MOS to develop a policy for handling rarities
and I think that's worth pursuing.  I plan on mentioning it at the next
board meeting.  But in the meantime, it would be interesting to develop a
conversation here.

A note of caution:  Norm will be very very unhappy if this devolves into
name-calling and finger pointing.  The bird was here for less than 48
hours.  It would have been difficult to organize much in that space
of time.   Let's keep it on the academic level of how to report a sighting
and still protect homeowners.

maryanne dolan
Elkton, Md
(president of the Cecil BIrd Club)

On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 5:54 AM, Paul Woodward <> wrote:

>      I am curious why the Green Violet-ear pictured on
> E-bird hasn't been reported on this list.  Was this the
> sighting that was referred to in a recent posting that
> hadn't been reported to the local bird club president?
>
> Paul Woodward
>
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