This is forwarded from Bill Smith, who recently spent some time in our
region and thus has been browsing tweeters from time to time. He tuned in
to the discussion about vagrants (perhaps with vested interest, as he saw
the hummingbird).

I should add that the probably hurricane-borne Black Swift that Jack
Bowling cited from New England is indeed a bona fide West Indian land bird
on the North Atlantic coast. However, it's not a *resident* West Indian
land bird. This is a *migratory* species, spending only the summer in the
West Indies. Thus the bird displaced could easily have been migrating over
the ocean and does not represent evidence contrary to what I have been
saying and what Bill reiterates below.

>I think it's correct to say that there's not a single proven case of live
>displacement of a _truly resident landbird_ by a hurricane in the West
>Indian region. The only people who speculate about such things are people
>who haven't lived through one. After a great hurricane hit St. Vincent in
>1898, 2 _dead_ St. Vincent Parrots washed ashore on neighboring St. Lucia,
>for example, and the species' population was decimated (Clark, A.H. 1905.
>Birds of the southern Lesser Antilles. Proc. Boston Nat. Hist. Soc. 32:
>203-312, p. 270). But no live one was ever seen elsewhere.
>
>A good indicator is the degree of island-by-island endemism in the West
>Indies, and the general lack of recorded inter-island vagrancy by such
>species.
>
>Dispersal of survivors trying to deal with the impact of a storm or other
>phenomena like volcanic eruptions on food sources, after the fact, is
>another issue, but I'm not aware that off-island displacement has ever
>been proven even in that more likely scenario. There may also be some
>displacement of some species as a result of high winds, but that's not
>quite the same as saying that a hurricane sweeps a bird off its
>perch and deposits it alive, hundreds of miles away.
>
>Yet birds do strange things. The first LaSagra's Flycatcher in the USA
>was of the Cuban race, in non-coastal Alabama, not storm-related (Miles,
>M.L. 1967. Auk 84: 279).
>
>Why, you'd think I was subscribed to Tweeters...:-)
>----------------
>P W (Bill) Smith
>Redland, Florida USA

Dennis Paulson, Director phone 253-756-3798
Slater Museum of Natural History fax 253-756-3352
University of Puget Sound e-mail dpaulson at ups.edu
Tacoma, WA 98416
http://www.ups.edu/biology/museum/museum.html