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Odd tern
- To: "carolinabirds@duke.edu" <carolinabirds@duke.edu>
- Subject: Odd tern
- From: Clyde Sorenson <clyde_sorenson@ncsu.edu>
- Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 15:25:24 -0400
- Delivered-to: pardo@metalab.unc.edu
- Sender: carolinabirds-owner@acpub.duke.edu
- User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02
All,
Last week I left the beach for the day on Tuesday to participate in a
NCSU fisheries management class exercise at the Umstead Research Farms
near Butner, NC. While the fisheries exercise was a rather dramatic bust
compared to previous years, we did see some interesting birds, including
an osprey over the farm pond we were attempting to sample and a breeding
plumage ruddy duck on the pond. We also saw a very pale tern, slightly
larger than a "common" class bird with a rather short, heavy, black
bill, circle the pond several times before departing towards the
northwest. As best we could determine, it was a gull-billed, but we were
reluctant to say it so far inland. Any other inland sitings of
gull-billed in the NC Piedmont? The closest large body of water would be
Falls, 10-15 miles south and east of where we were.
On Thursday, Nate Bacheler and I saw and heard several Bachman's
sparrows (after some confusion), briefly heard and saw red-cockaded
woodpeckers, and turned up a house wren in the Millis Road savannahs in
the Croatan. This area is worth visiting just for the vegetation, let
alone the birds- in the light rain we had, the savannahs were absolutely
magical. We later shooshed up a female (maybe a pair of females) painted
bunting and a blue grosbeak near the ferry landing at Hammock' Beach
State Park near Swansboro; that afternoon I was able to
"officially"count painted bunting for the year when my kids and I
discovered a beautiful singing male at the waterslide park in Emerald
Isle (I'm sorry, but seeing a female PB really isn't seeing "painted"
;-) ). It does pay to keep your eyes open and ears tuned-even hurtling
down a plastic tube with your kids!
Clyde Sorenson
Clayton and Raleigh, NC