Boy! The list has really gone "cuckoo" here since it's initial inception with
Dennis Paulson's post then titled: "rare-bird "sighting"" on December 12.
This whole thread, gone rope stage, now gone hauser, with all it's dangly
little strings is incredibly amusing. 'Tis the season for such merriment I
guess, eh.

97-12-15, Rob Conway writes:

<< 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.
>>

Point well stated Rob! How easy it might be to forget, or not even think of a
birds origin during the initial excitment when finding a "rare" bird or 'new
species' for a state or the AOU area even in the road. Upon returning to
Missouri from a birding road trip to southern Mexico over the school break
Christmas holidays so many years ago, we discovered a Blue-Black Grosbeak in
the street right where it had finally decided to fall off the grill. This
wasn't just any 'ol Blue Grosbeak that had turned black and blue then black
with age from a long road trip, but a Blue-Black Grosbeak. I wonder what the
WRBC's verdict might be if someone comes upon a Scaled Quail in the road
somewhere in the Lower Columbia Basin.

One of the most horrorific hysterical threads I have ever seen on a bird
dscussion list on the internet was one two or three years ago on BirdChat,
where people were posting some of the most amazing stories and first hand
accounts you would ever hope 'not' to see.

Richard Rowlett (Pagodroma at aol.com)
47.56N, 122.13W
(Seattle/Bellevue, WA USA)