Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, December 26, 1994 TAG: 9412290029
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: A12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"We literally stopped their vehicle and made them get out," said Mike Smith, president of the Roanoke Valley Bird Club.
The Maryland family will be eternally grateful.
What Smith and fellow Roanoke bird club members - Jim Ayers, Jim Flynn, Tom Johnson and Norwood Middleton - showed them was a western marsh harrier. It was the first recorded North American spotting of the species.
"You want to get as many people as possible to see something like that," said Smith.
The local birders had made a December journey to Virginia's Eastern Shore in search of another unusual bird, a Ross' goose, a species that winters in the West. While probing the Tom's Cove area, they spotted the harrier.
"You see something like that in disbelief," said Smith. "When I first saw the bird, I thought it had to be a trick of the light. It was an overcast day, and the bird appeared to have a whitish-colored head. Crows can appear to have whitish heads at times."
When the creature rose to a perch, the birders were afforded a better view.
"We got the scopes, binoculars and everything on it," said Smith. "That sucker had a green-colored head with a black eyeline. It kind of reminded you a little bit of what an osprey looks like."
Flynn said it looked like a European species. He had been spending evenings paging through European bird guides, and thought it was some kind of harrier.
"When something unusual shows up, you may not know the name of it right off the top of your head, but you know it is something different," said Smith. "You know the birds that are supposed to be there. No one had a European field guide anywhere to be found."
The birders drove to a pay phone at the refuge headquarters where Flynn called some friends in Pennsylvania, an older couple who have birded around the word. When he described the find to them, they searched their field guides and told Flynn that he and his companions were observing a marsh harrier.
It is a species that lives in Britan and Europe and migrates to northern Africa, said Smith.
"Evidently, he took a right somewhere," said Smith. "Sometimes something goes awry, and they get turned around and they go completely the wrong direction. He could have ridden over here on the swirls generated by [Hurricane] Gordon"
Smith contacted the North American Rare Bird Alert and learned that there is no record for the species on this continent. "It is a first time," he said
Word of the discovery spread rapidly, and birders from as far away as Cape May, N.J., have traveled to Chincoteague to take a look, but the harrier has disappeared.
"It has not been seen since," said Smith. "The last time we saw it, it was flying north, a couple hundred yards inland."
by CNB