Subject: Re: The Thumping of the Shrew
Date: Jul 19 18:22:42 1995
From: Alvaro Jaramillo - alvaro at quake.net


Dennis wrote:
>>Don, I'm not sure if you mean cuervovore as in "they sit around all day
>>drinking Jose Cuervo" or cuervovore as in "after some of the board
>>meetings, just about everyone is ready to eat crow."

Don answered:

>That's pretty good, actually, some do have to eat crow. Not me,
>of course, never.
>
>I'd never made the connection, my Spanish doesn't go much beyond
>"mas cervesa" and "la cuenta".
>

You mean cerveza! Don't forget to add a 'por favor' in there just to be
polite ;-) .
-

BTW, is it true that they had to market JC as 'Jacques Corneille' in France
so those
language conscious French would bypass the bordeaux aisle, Serge?

Jeez, this is getting too silly even for my tastes, so I will add something
about pajaros.

Just a couple of days I was looking at a nice mixed flock of Alternate
dowitchers. There were at least 200 and it was about a 60:40 split
Short-billed to Long-billed. I took this opportunity to try and use some
marks I have been testing to identify the two species and was quite happy to
notice that one of them worked really well, at least with this group. Keep
in mind that I was quite close to these birds. In any case, what I noticed
was that all birds that had spots on the **thighs** or the feathers
immediately above or covering the thighs were Short-bills. No Long-bills
showed this pattern. This is just an effect of the differences in
distribution of marks on the underparts, but its discrete enough that it is
easy to look for. Related to this, is that only Short-bills showed white on
the thighs, all Long-bills had reddish thighs. These marks should be visible
on birds in tweeterland as I was looking at _caurinus_ Short-bills, the
common type that flies along the Pacific. I will keep looking at this to see
if it is indeed consistent, or at least consistent enough.
Another feature that one can look for is relative wing length.
Short-bills have relatively longer wings than Long-bills. In the field this
translates to a visible difference on some birds. All birds which showed
nearly non-existent primary extensions (primaries extending past tertials)
were Long-bills. Conversely, all birds that showed a distinct wing extension
(primaries extending past the tail) were Short-bills. However, there was a
great deal of intermediate birds!
So there's some stuff to look for next time you want to identify a
Becasseau roux from a Becasseu a long-bec.




Alvaro Jaramillo
Half Moon Bay, CA

alvaro at quake.net