The passages of Bonnie & (Prince?) Charley this weekend probably won't bring
with them many entrained seabirds to our area. Bonnie has been absorbed by
the frontal boundary and is now described, in s. Georgia, as "extratropical" -
thus any few seabirds collected by that storm have probably already fallen out.
The jury is still out on Charley, which could be in Virginia as early as
Saturday afternoon. Storms with this sort of coastal track tend to come later
in
the hurricane season (e.g., Josephine in 1996), when the trough's alignment
with the East Coast is more routine (very unusual for this time of year). Few
truly pelagic birds have been seen in such storms in Virginia, but it's always
worth looking around after the storm has passed, safety permitting.
Totally unrelated, I picked up a copy of the coffee-table book "The Eastern
Shore of Virginia Chamber of Commerce 1953-2003", which on pages 100-108 has a
nice section on the Birding Festival, with abundant color (and a few
black-and-white) photographs of some of Virginia's birders and banders, among
them:
Mary Arginteanu (p. 100 - with a nice Black-throated Blue Warbler), Karen
Terwilliger (p. 101), Earl Hodnett (p. 102 - I think Larry Lynch is on this
page, but
he has binoculars to his eyes!), Gary Williamson (p. 103 - in habitat!
guiding folks by canoe), Grayson 'Butch' Pearce and Brian Sullivan (p. 104 - on
the
hawkwatch, laughing about something), John Dillinger (p. 105 - at the banding
station), Tony Quezon (p. 106 - in the hawk blind, banding a .. Cooper's or
Sharpie? in a Pringles can), and David and Linda Hughes, testing optics in
Peggy
Spiegel's set-up (p. 107). Many other good folks are represented with
smaller images - my reading glasses are misplaced, and I can't make anyone else
out
despite some squinting!
Ned Brinkley
Cape Charles, VA
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