Hi Tweets,

Murray Hansen writes:

>Michael: I was curious about your sign-off quote and looked it up. Is there
>just a little bit of chauvinism here? Wouldn't it be a courtesy to attribute
>the quote to "Mrs." Aphra Behn? After all, she WAS a spy for King Charles the
>II and certainly deserves a little credit for surviving THAT business in, was
>it, Antwerp?

Beats me, Murray. I was trolling through the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
when I came across the quote and thought it an apt sig. Dale Goble passed on
that she was a Leveller, an egalitarian political group of the time, and I
remember reading--a long time ago--a part of her novel, The Moor's Revenge,
in excerpt and being impressed by it. She sounds like a remarkably
multi-faceted and accomplished woman in a comprehensively male-chauvinist
age, so much so that those same male chauvinists of the time must have
wondered at least briefly if she were not a man in disguise. That's the
problem with learning things in bits: one can stand as the target for the
Johnsonian remark that "his knowledge was as wide as the Baltic Sea, and as
shallow as that soup-tureen." Murray, here's your opportunity to edify this
heathen soul.

>About the two warblers (Black-throated Gray and Townsend's): have heard both
>at different times and places and am confused about the apparent similarity in
>song that you mentioned. If the spirit moves you, would you enlarge a little
>bit about that?

Murray, I can enlarge to the extent of saying that sometimes I think I can
separate them by ear but am confounded by the other species as often as I
get the voice-only ID right. But it's not just my own auditory shortcoming.
Other people here who are *much* better at ear-birding than I am say it's
easier to mis-ID them than not and say that each borrows the other's song,
to which the only logical response seems to be: in migration at least don't
depend on song alone; get a visual confirmation that it's one or the other
or both. There is the difference in breeding habitat preference where,
generally speaking, Townsend's Warbler Dendroica townsendi tends to like
coniferous old-growth and Black-throated Gray Warbler D. nigrescens prefers
deciduous.

Perhaps this song-similarity is geographical, and that the song-types of the
birds near you are more readily distinguishable.

>Also, there was an Eurasian Wigeon
>behind the Last Stage saloon in Gorst!

Sleeping it off, the old sot. '-)

Michael Price A brave world, Sir,
Vancouver BC Canada full of religion, knavery and change;
mprice at mindlink.net we shall shortly see better days.
Aphra Behn (1640-1689)