[mou] (no subject)

[dan&erika]

Interestingly enough all the South Dakota banding recoveries for Herring
Gulls are from the St. Lawrence Seaway (!).  (See Birds of South Dakota.)
(I have the data for MN recoveries but have not studied them yet.)

Dan Tallman
Northfield

On Dec 19, 2007 1:02 PM, Alt, Mark <Mark.Alt at bestbuy.com> wrote:

> Spending a day with Lars Jonnson in the field was a big wake-up call for
> me. We went to La Crosse, WI and spotted a Glaucous-winged Gull, but
> what we spent time on (2 hours) was detailing the pattern of primary
> windows (white spots) on Herring Gulls. After sketching and cataloguing
> the 200 Herring Gulls in range of view, Lars proceeded to tell us that
> with all likelihood, these birds were from the St Lawrence Seaway, these
> were from the Midwest, and these may have their origins in the north
> Atlantic, it was time well spent with one of the world's experts on
> gulls, but the lesson was that Lars knew this stuff because he spent
> time looking at it, studying it and thinking about it. He understood the
> irregularity and variability in what was for me up to that time - a
> flock of gulls.
> Bob Duncan, a great birder out of Florida, was coaching me on Vireos one
> day. "Check every Red-eye for the Black Whiskers", and when I asked him
> how many Red-eyes he might tally in a year, he guessed 2-3 thousand. How
> many Black-Whiskered Vireos do you get in a year? He said he might get 1
> every 3rd or fourth year, adding that if I didn't check all the
> Red-eyes, I would never get any of the others.
> I appreciate the mad skills of a Kim Eckert, Mike Hendrickson, Kim Risen
> who can discern ambivalent field marks at a great distance in a mixed
> flock of birds, and I am only scared a little bit at the Frank
> Nicolleti's of the world who can call out birds at an accuracy level and
> scale that tires me to talk of it, so for myself, so what I do for my
> own skills is I play warbler and sparrow songs every spring, focusing on
> the voices of birds rather than the exact phrasing (Chestnut Sideds
> still sound like Yellow till I hear a bunch of them), and I chase down a
> sighting of every bird I hear sing ( I wear boots a lot). In the bog in
> early spring, this means craning my neck and moving around a lot to pick
> Blackburnians giving a partial call out from Bay-Breasteds and Cape
> May's. This means every Red-eyed Vireo can be a Philadelphia. Call notes
> of sparrows are tough, but if you can get them down, you can find a lot
> more Harris's in fall. I wish I had some of the time back that I have
> spent studying the songs of Savannah Sparrows across the USA, they seem
> to have more variability in plumage and song than anything else I have
> run into, but wait a minute, I take that back. Maybe I can match Lars
> for Savannah Sparrows.... There is always hope. Good birding.
>
>
>
> Mark Alt
> Lean Six Sigma Black Belt
> Project Resources Group
> Best Buy Co., Inc.
>
>


-- 
Dan or Erika Tallman
Northfield, Minnesota
http://danerika.googlepages.com/home
danerika at gmail.com

".... the best shod travel with wet feet"
"Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes ...."--Thoreau
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