>Jack Bowling writes:
>
>Note that a car-killed Yellow-billed Cuckoo in Victoria July 5, 1989
>provided the first BC record since 1927 (in Birds of BC). Perhaps
>there has been a northward resurgence of this species in the past
>decade?
>
>Rob Saecker responded:
>
>Or perhaps just more people interested enough in birds to stop and
>look at roadkill?
==================================================================

One must be very, very careful when using road killed birds as official
recorded species. As a kid I used to regularly walk a stretch of
California Highway 41, one of the main routes into Yosemite National
Park, in the foothills of the Sierra. One of the characteristics of
this road is that it is steep, and it is in country that has daily
summertime temperatures over 100f. At every rest stop, where people
would stop to cool off overheated motorhomes, you could find bird
carcasses that had no business being there - cardinals, bobwhite, and
once a painted bunting - that people had popped off of their grills.
Road killed? Yes. Locally. Definately not. Cars can move a small
package, like a dead bird, thousands of miles in 72-96 hours.
Yellow-billed cuckoo in Victoria? Likely a local casualty, but unless
the actual event was witnessed there's no way of telling that the bird
wasn't splatted in Manitoba or Nebraska 3 or 4 days earlier and just
picked Victoria as the place to drop off of its deadly host.

Rob Conway
Bellevue, WA

robin_conway at hotmail.com

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