In Bill Shelmerdine's e-mail on the ASHY STORM-PETREL, he gave coordinates and for those that have GOOGLE EARTH they can enter the coordinates and figure out about where the boat was relative to the Washington Coast. It is a little tricky because Google Earth doesn't seem to like over water coordinates. Don't know why or maybe I messed up. You have to enter the coords as:

N46 53.182 W124 55.333

(You can copy and paste into teh coordinate box) and you'll end up off the coast. Using the little hand (cursor), you can read the coords in the lower left of the satellite image, move around, and get to the above coords.

It also strike me that if someone had given teh coords for the Bay-breasted Warbler, you could have entered them into Google Earth and picked an altitude above the ground, enabled the "roads" overlay (they show better at different altitudes) from menu at bottom left of screen and gotten a map overlaid on the satellite photo to print out and use for driving. It also shows forest roads but not quite as accurately..

Google Earth is a free download, loads very quickly and responds quickly to coords inputted. Satellite imagery varies depending on location and country (lots of Russia isn't very good!!). In Seattle area you can see vehicles on I-5 and aircraft at SEA-TAC. Also, can find your home and fly down over it using the + or -. It is not Real Time (but we can hope that it will be someday. Uh, maybe not because then you could be followed every where you drove!!! No more 'closet' birding.).

Enjoy birding in the Information Age!!

Bob Taylor
Bonney Lake, WA

taylorrt at comcast.net


> dirty details, this was at 46 53 182; 124 55 333.
>
> The description from my notes is as follows:
> A dark storm petrel, 1st seen side-by-side with Fork-tailed, (and later
> side-by-side with Leach's). It stood out in particular as very dark bodied,