Hi, all -

I spent some time in Worcester today and had a fun day. Nothing extraordinary, but some cool birds.

OC jetty - a pair of Harlequin Ducks swimming and perched on the rocks.

Castaways - 8 (!) Marbled Godwits. Also about 1800 other shorebirds, mostly unidentified thanks to the sun, glare and shimmer. Some day I will time both the sun and the tide right.

Bayside development pond - Saw some interspecific behavior I'd never seen before between wigeons and coots. I was sitting watching the narrow arm of the pond from my car blind. Each actively feeding coot was shadowed by one or two wigeon. When the coot dove, the wigeon swam to the dive spot and seemed to follow the underwater coot. Just before the coot surfaced, the wigeon would jab. I guess this freed up some of vegetation the coot brought up from the bottom. The coots seemed completely unperturbed by this and retained control of most of the booty. But the wigeons were getting some. The coots were calm, but the wigeons got testy with each other: "hands off - that's my coot!" Interestingly, the gadwall did not participate in this piracy. Maybe they hadn't figured it out, or maybe they were just better mannered. :)

Bayside (Assateague) - at the end of the road there was a white-headed, yellow-billed Myrtle Warbler. It also had extraneous white elsewhere as well - cool bird! I got some photos in spite of the best efforts of a mockingbird that kept going after it. 

See some of you on the boat tomorrow!
Nancy Magnusson
Ellicott City, MD

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