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Anna's in GA, Re: Barnicle Geese, Audubon, etc.



Hi Carolinabirders,

Another western vagrant in the east: an Anna's Hummingbird has been 
banded in Snellville, GA, just east of Atlanta. See the Georgia listserv 
for details. And the New Jersey RBA has reports of Allen's Hummingbird 
and Ash-throated Flycatcher. I'm soon heading in the other direction, 
where Miami Beach has a report of a Cuban Grassquit; alas, the bird is 
considered by the reporters to be a probable escapee. More on that topic 
(escapees) later...

On Wed, 13 Dec 2000 Bpworthing@aol.com wrote:

> Mike - Congratulations on your new book!

Yes, many congratulations. Mike, could you provide the ISBN number of 
your book, either to the list or to me privately? I don't know if my 
local bookstore (the Regulator) will carry it on the shelves, but they're 
great about special-ordering things they don't have in stock...

> AUDUBON insisted on keeping the CBC
> issue for, I assume, public relations value, they get a lot of mileage 
> out of the CBC. AUDUBON still wantS ITS cake and eat it too. By issuing 
> a gutted out CBC issue, and keeping the income generated by our five 
> dollars, they can still get newspaper coverage on the counts as an 
> "Audubon" venture, at minimal cost. This whole attitudde by Audubon, 
> which dates back many years (15+ anyway), is why I left them some 8 
> years ago.

I highly doubt that Audubon is making a profit off the CBCs. It sounds 
like the whole motivation for the reduction in the CBC issue is that they 
are sustaining big monetary losses, giving free copies to compilers and 
not selling enough copies to other folks to cover the expense of the 
publication.
 
On the other hand, Pete is far from the first person I've heard alleging 
that National Audubon cares more about PR and soliciting donations and 
memberships than about science or conservation. I long ago dropped my NAS 
membership in favor of Massachusetts Audubon (which is NOT an NAS 
affiliate), the Nature Conservancy, and other such groups. BIRDCHAT was 
full of talk earlier this year about how NAS was mistreating and abusing 
their state and local affiliates; those messages are in the archives at 
http://listserv.arizona.edu/lsv/www/birdchat.html for anyone who's 
curious.

On Wed, 13 Dec 2000 RWDOTSON@AOL.COM wrote: 
> 
> If they are escapees wouldn't they be banded, wouldn't there be some 
> evidence of having their wings clipped and how do they decide if these 
> birds are countable for ABA life list purposes? Someone suggested that 
> I go to Pennsylvania to see the Barnicle geese there, because PA is 
> more liberal about letting them count than NC is.

Escapees from a zoo or other reputable establishment would have to be 
banded. However, not everyone who keeps birds in captivity is entirely 
reputable. And certainly not everyone who keeps waterfowl clips their 
birds' wings. Apparently the one in Scotland Neck that Steve Schultz 
mentioned doesn't either band or clip. And even if some banded, 
wing-clipped birds escaped from captivity, they could easily breed and 
have offspring which were unbanded, never clipped, but still not 
countable by ABA. This appears to be happening in my native Massachusetts 
with some escaped Whooper Swans; perhaps in a decade or two they'll be a 
countable nusiance species like Mute Swans are, but as yet they are ABA- 
uncountable.

And seeing the birds in Pennsylvania has no bearing on lists reported to 
the ABA. First, as Will Cook has said in this space many times before, 
nowhere in the ABA rules does it require that a species be accepted by 
the state records committee to be counted on an ABA list. It is up to 
individual birders to be ethical and conscientious in applying ABA rules 
and counting birds, not the state commitees. The state committees are 
more or less scientific, and so must be conservative in accepting data. 
ABA members who report their lists are players in a game, and so have to 
read the rules and interpret from them which behaviors constitute 
cheating in this game and which are allowed. The rules are listed on-line 
at http://americanbirding.org/resources/reslistru2.htm

Second, the Pennsylvania state committee is probably not more "liberal" 
in counting Barnacle Goose records. They just live in a part of the 
country that receives many more vagrants from Greenland, Iceland, and 
Eurasia than we do. They also accepted Pink-footed Goose a winter or so 
ago; I don't think this species has even been reported, much less 
accepted, down here in the Carolinas. And like I said before, the 
Barnacles up there often turn up in flocks of migrating birds, some of 
them traceable to Greenland or the adjacent arctic parts of Canada. The 
Barnacles here are associating with some obviously feral barnyard 
waterfowl. It seems pretty logical that the Barnacles are most likely 
feral as well, and thus not ABA-countable.

>                             Has anyone 
> seen Greater Scaup on the lake at RDU? I know you're supposed to go by head 
> shape and not head color, but a week ago saw Scaups that had a green head 
> equivalent to mallard duck green when the sun was just right. the sun was 
> very bright that day and their heads appeared just dark at other times. Just 
> like to know if
> a Lesser Scaup can have a green head under good light. 

The winter before last, or maybe the one before that, someone (Harry 
LeGrand, maybe?) definitely reported Greater Scaup at the Brier Creek 
Reservior adjacent to the RDU airport. However, the iridescent head 
coloration is notoriously unreliable in the field. Identification should 
be made by head shape or, better yet, the length of the white wing stripe 
(visible only in flight). For some Scaup identification tips, see Kenn 
Kaufman's take on the problem a 
http://www.birdersworld.com/fieldguide/scaup/scaup.html

Good birding,

Josh



Joshua S. Rose
Duke University
Department of Biology (Zoology, R.I.P.)

jsr6@acpub.duke.edu
http://www.duke.edu/~jsr6/