Subject: ID by ear ? not .....
Date: May 22 14:18:39 1999
From: Roger Craik - rcraik at home.com



Hi All

The following is just a clip from Toronto's "The Globe And Mail"
Saturday birding column which fits in with the current topic. I thought
I would pass it along.


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Missing, a wave of wood warblers
Saturday, May 22, 1999
Peter Whelan
POINT PELEE, Ont.-The American Birding Association brought its annual
convention to the area
this week, and somebody slipped the coin into the wrong slot of the
Great Spring Pelee Bird
Producing Machine,

<clip>
The warblers? They were there all right, in patches. Parula warblers,
among the prettiest, threw two
surprises. Normally, they come one or a few a day. It is normal to
strain the ear to locate them by
their small, up-and-over trill. In Tilden's Woods, one called, then
another, then another. "We couldn't
get away from them. There must have been a dozen," Sarah Rupert of
Sarnia, Ont. said.
One was spooky. "Prairie warbler!" someone called, and there was the
song of that rarer species.
But the singer was no prairie warbler. Warbler experts stood shocked and
watched a perfectly
plumaged parula warbler sing the more leisurely, rising song of the
prairie warbler for 15 minutes,
then sing like a parula. It was enough to weaken faith in the normally
rock-solid ability of trained ears
to pick up treetop warblers by song alone.
<clip>

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/index.html


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Good birding

Roger Craik
Maple Ridge BC