Phippsburg Me Map 6 Totman Cove
mega flock of mallards with Northern pintail continues
A friend just sent to me photos of a gorgeous Hermit Thrush in his yard in Yarmouth.
A tale of a good deed rewarded and how I met Donald Kroodsma:
My husband and I just returned from a trip to Maui to visit my son who lives there. Maui isn't a good place to go birding. There just aren't many birds, certainly not species diversity. Most of the endemics have been killed off, partly the end result of introductions of rats, cats and mongoose. I did get a good list of endemics though because my son lives on the side of the volcano, Haleakala which is in rainforest and high desert. We spent our time in the high country, not at resorts.
One night, my son drove us to the summit of Haleakala to see the sunset. It's a tortuous 22 miles of uphill switch backs. On the side of the road appeared a woman in her 60s hitchhiking. We pulled over to give her a lift which my son said was good form on the Crater Road. But then, she told us that her husband was in the bushes. We saw a backpack on the side of the road where she was pointing. Of course, this seemed really weird at first. But, it turned out that she and her husband had been on the summit for sunrise. They had left a car there and gone hiking with the intention of going back for sunset. But, they had grossly underestimated how much further they had to walk. They thought the summit was about 2 miles, when actually it was 6 and all up hill. They decided that they would have to get a lift up or they were going to be walking in the dark on a dangerous road. They thought though that no one was likely to pick up a man and a woman, so they split up. He was going to stay hidden in the bushes so she could get a ride, then wait there until she could come back down with their car to get him. We said we would be glad to take them both up and so all five of us and their back packs crammed into our compact rental and went up the hill. I had just seen my first Ne Ne (Hawaiian endemic geese) and had to tell somebody and these two were a fresh audience for my excitement. They were very interested, too. It turned out that they were Donald Kroodzma and his wife, Janet from Massachusetts. Don is a very famous author of books on bird song and has won piles of awards, the Roger Tory Peterson of bird songs, as it were. He has won a John Burroughs medal, is a fellow of the American Ornithologists' Union and retired biology proff with UMass.
Today, we received in the mail from him his book Birdsong By The Seasons signed by him with a thanks for the "Haleakala taxi." It has two bird song ID CDs in it, too! No excuses for my poor vocalization ID skills now.
Robin R Robinson
mega flock of mallards with Northern pintail continues
A friend just sent to me photos of a gorgeous Hermit Thrush in his yard in Yarmouth.
A tale of a good deed rewarded and how I met Donald Kroodsma:
My husband and I just returned from a trip to Maui to visit my son who lives there. Maui isn't a good place to go birding. There just aren't many birds, certainly not species diversity. Most of the endemics have been killed off, partly the end result of introductions of rats, cats and mongoose. I did get a good list of endemics though because my son lives on the side of the volcano, Haleakala which is in rainforest and high desert. We spent our time in the high country, not at resorts.
One night, my son drove us to the summit of Haleakala to see the sunset. It's a tortuous 22 miles of uphill switch backs. On the side of the road appeared a woman in her 60s hitchhiking. We pulled over to give her a lift which my son said was good form on the Crater Road. But then, she told us that her husband was in the bushes. We saw a backpack on the side of the road where she was pointing. Of course, this seemed really weird at first. But, it turned out that she and her husband had been on the summit for sunrise. They had left a car there and gone hiking with the intention of going back for sunset. But, they had grossly underestimated how much further they had to walk. They thought the summit was about 2 miles, when actually it was 6 and all up hill. They decided that they would have to get a lift up or they were going to be walking in the dark on a dangerous road. They thought though that no one was likely to pick up a man and a woman, so they split up. He was going to stay hidden in the bushes so she could get a ride, then wait there until she could come back down with their car to get him. We said we would be glad to take them both up and so all five of us and their back packs crammed into our compact rental and went up the hill. I had just seen my first Ne Ne (Hawaiian endemic geese) and had to tell somebody and these two were a fresh audience for my excitement. They were very interested, too. It turned out that they were Donald Kroodzma and his wife, Janet from Massachusetts. Don is a very famous author of books on bird song and has won piles of awards, the Roger Tory Peterson of bird songs, as it were. He has won a John Burroughs medal, is a fellow of the American Ornithologists' Union and retired biology proff with UMass.
Today, we received in the mail from him his book Birdsong By The Seasons signed by him with a thanks for the "Haleakala taxi." It has two bird song ID CDs in it, too! No excuses for my poor vocalization ID skills now.
Robin R Robinson
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