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Townville birds; retraction



Bing Somers and I birded in the Townville area (Anderson Co., SC) this
morning.  Our best bird was a Yellow-crowned Night-Heron that flew over us
(on three occasions, in fact) near the bridge on Fork School Road.  That
was a first for my Townville list.  Other notable birds: Solitary Sandpiper
(a pair at Beaverdam WMA); Indigo Bunting (newly arrived); Grasshopper
Sparrow (singing on the pasture fences at Dobbins Farm); Horned Lark (not
seen on every trip here); and American Pipit (ditto).  No sign yet of the
Orchard Orioles that nested last year just off Fork School Road.  Also no
Dickcissels, Blue Grosbeaks, or Eastern Kingbirds.

Honesty compels me to retract my tentative identification of a singing (but
unseen) Tennessee Warbler at Beaverdam ten days ago.  Today, within 15
yards of the earlier location, we found the same singing bird?already a bad
sign for the prior ID?and, after great difficulty, we were able to see it
clearly.  It was a Field Sparrow, singing an untypical, distinctly
three-part song.  (It also, most untypically, hid itself high in the thick
foliage of an oak.)  We have both heard lots of Field Sparrows, and in fact
we heard lots of them today, but we've never heard one that sounded so much
like a Tennessee.  (None of the four Field Sparrow songs on the Stokes CD
sounds like what we heard today.)  Just goes to show, I guess: trust your
eyes over your ears, but don't trust either too much.

I don't know what this does to Bob Maxwell's report of a singing (but
unseen) Tennessee at Beaverdam three days after my own report.  Certainly
it doesn't show that Bob and Barb were wrong, since maybe there was a
Tennessee there then.  But today's bird was surely what Bing, Jane Chew,
and I heard ten days ago.

But, really, we did see a Yellow-crowned Night-Heron today!

Jim Edwards
jim.edwards@furman.edu