[NatureNS] Possible least bittern, what to do

Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2007 08:04:28 -0400
From: "Eric L. Mills" <e.mills@dal.ca>
To: naturens@chebucto.ns.ca
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Steve - it should go directly to Andrew Hebda at the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History 
on Summer Street. It certainly sounds interesting.
Eric

On 10 Jan 2007 at 2:24, Stephen Shaw wrote:

> Question for birders in these slow times: we are not seeing much of anything
> except squirrels, at our feeders at Halifax.
>   Over Xmas, we visited the family of a friend of my daughter's near Hubbards.
> The friend's mum told me that earlier she had accidentally killed an unusual
> bird back in May while driving along highway 3 near a tidal salt marsh area,
> close to Boutiliers Point, approx 7200 section.  The bird seemed to be 
> behaving
> oddly, fluttering around, as she drove by and that it suddenly shot in 
> front of
> her car and she had no chance to avoid it.  She stopped and took the dead bird
> home and reckoned that it best fit the description of a least bittern,
> according their Audubon bird guide.  When I got home I looked this up on the
> Sibley maps and it seems that a least bittern would be only a vagrant this far
> north, but it's not clear (to me) if that makes it exceedingly rare and a
> really interesting find, or merely rather irregular and of no major 
> interest to
> birders.  The point is that that the corpse still exists -- she 
> preserved it in
> her freezer. Her question to me was what to do with it, usefully.
>   I commented that it might be useful first to ask people on this network (1)
> whether a possible least bittern is sufficiently interesting to get someone
> competent to check the ID, somehow; (2) is a frozen, dead (possible) least
> bittern useful for anyone to have a present of -- e.g. I recall that 
> Randy Lauf
> once collected specimens for an intro biology class at StFX. (May 2006 
> probably
> means past the due date for a bittern stew).
>   The description I have is that "it is soft black on the back and rich golden
> brown on the front and has yellow legs".  Didn't see it myself.
>   She's just got back to me and suggested that she could photo the 
> corpse, and I
> guess I could put up the resulting photo on the Flickr site for 
> inspection. Before going to this bother, I'd like to know if it is a 
> sufficiently
> interesting bird to make this worthwhile.  Anyone have suggestions or 
> comments?
> Steve (Halifax)
> 

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