Posted by Larry Manfredi on January 13, 2003 at 08:46:31:
My wife, son and I looked for the Cassin's Kingbird reported on Saturday
without any luck. We did however find the largest group of Western
Kingbirds that we have seen at this location, 22 Western Kingbirds, 5
Scissor-tailed Flycatchers and 1 Eastern Phoebe! We scoped all of the 22
Western Kingbirds and saw that all of them had white outer tail feathers, we
tried hard to find the Cassin's which may have been in the group somewhere,
but we just could not find it.
The Western Kingbirds came out in force at about 5:30 p.m., the
Scissor-tailed Flycatchers showed up near that time as well. When we
arrived around 4:30 p.m., we saw one Kingbird on the phone wires, it
promptly flew into the grove of trees on the west side of 212 ave. As we
patiently waited another three Kingbirds arrived on the wires and then by
5:30 the birds seemed to come out of nowhere and were everywhere. Most of
them were perched on the phone wires going east to west between the grove of
trees on the west side of 212 ave. and the house also on the west side.
They were all lined up on the wires which made using the scope easy to
quickly check their tail feathers as well as all of the other field marks.
Good luck to those who look for the Cassin's Kingbird, there have been 2
previous Cassin's Kingbirds at this location in the last 11 or so years.
Larry Manfredi
Homestead, Fl.
E-mail: birderlm@bellsouth.net
http://www.southfloridabirding.com