OK tweets, I'll jump on this bandwagon. Not to bash, but to tell a
funny story from the BIG state (that's Texas! Which refuses to admit it's
actually the runner-up).

After a fine morning's birding in early May at High Island, I met a fella
from Cape May. A Pomarine Jaegar was known to be at Bolivar Flats, so we
decided to head out there together and find it. I met him out there, and
we easily found the jaegar, then decided to head out to the Flats to see
what shorebirds we could stir up. That winter somebody (in their
infinite wisdom) had added some wooden posts to make the mudflats
inaccessible to four-wheel drive trucks. Well we were there at low tide,
and some hot-rod fools in a nice new Toyota 4WD truck went zipping by all
the birders, and deliberately maneuvered below the pilings and out onto
the mudflats. I'm sure they were all drunk (and 18-ish males), and I
think their goal was to scare off the shorebird flocks and piss us off.
About two hours later, Kevin and I had made it way out on the flats, when
we saw the same hotshots and their pretty new truck, stuck up to the
*doors* in that gooey intertidal mud. I must say revenge has never been so
sweet. They were shoveling like the dickens, using boards, etc., to get
that truck out. And of course the whole time, the tide was inching its
way back in, it was a race against time...

Well two years later I'm talking to a friend who mentioned he got some
fantastic shorebird photos out on Bolivar Flats. When I asked how he got
so close, he replied that there was this stripped-out truck body out in
the mud there, and he climbed inside and snapped away. The shorebirds of
course never knew he was in there and would forage right up next to the
truck body, about 5 feet from the end of his lens.

He-he-he-he-he (evil-sounding snicker)

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Michael R. Smith
Univ. of Washington, Seattle
whimbrel at u.washington.edu
http://salmo.cqs.washington.edu/~wagap/mike.html