Not intermediate, but cattle?

I've just found the Editors' Notebook from a 2004 issue of North American Birds, where Edward S. Brinkley writes:

We intend to revisit an older article on Intermediate Egret on Midway Atoll, Hawaii (N. A. B. 53: 441-443), which may pertain to an "Eastern Cattle-Egret" rather than an Intermediate Egret (have we piqued the reader's interest?).

As the author of the article in question, I am eager to see the clarification, which is apparently approaching a draft stage now. Ever since I was informed that the American Ornithologists' Union check-list committee passed over the "intermediate" egret report in its 45^th supplement, I have hoped to read a well documented alternative view. I expect to be presumed mistaken and am comfortable with that. It's just hard to be wrong so publicly.

It happens, though; I am not alone. After recounting a handful of other questioned identifications recorded in NAB, Brinkley goes on to write:

It is remarkable, and very humbling to one's own grasp of bird identification, to receive opposing opinions from experts in their fields!

Comments

The Elusive Subja Seed

Why am I so captivated by the idea of drinking tasteless, slippery, crunchy-kerneled seeds? Because subja seeds sound like fun. I first learned of them by browsing The Indian Spice Kitchen , where Monisha Bharadwaj describes them, but Osimum basilicum seeds seem impossible to find. I made a special trip to Seattle's Uwajimaya to track them down, but came up empty. I stopped at Market Spice at Pike Street, where they hadn't heard of them (but they suggested another shop down the street). I went into Souk, where the gentleman understood what I was looking for only after I described it; he knew the seeds by a different name, which he couldn't remember, and said his sister gets them at a shop (the name not in his memory) on Roosevelt Avenue. But I was out of time in the city and couldn't follow up. (But before I took more than a few steps out Souk's door, the proprietor called me back in, because he had asked his arriving friend what those seeds were called. Tukmaria, ...

Realistic HTX-100

The 30th Annual Conference of the Central States VHF Society was held July 26-28, 1996 at the Thunderbird Hotel & Convention Center in Bloomington, Minnesota. Among the papers presented was Make Your HTX-100 a Flexible IF Transceiver by Rus Healy, NJ2L (now K2UA).

Oh, no! Web 2.0

Always wanting to be at least semi-aware of what's coming down the pike in technology, I was drawn to TechSoup 's " event " this week (a hosted forum discussion with special guests) promising to "demystify Web 2.0 technologies and illustrate how using new socially oriented technological innovations can help the nonprofit community." First off, I'm so semi-unaware lately that I thought they were going to be addressing Internet 2. Just as well I was wrong. To wiki or not to wiki? To start syndication really simply? To tag, make social bookmarks, et cetera... these are the questions. Nothing "new," really. Just the current wave of actualized concepts being ridden by the tech-savvy (and some not-so-savvy) into the inevitable evolution of the web. So I got thinking about my own foundering blog, static websites, aborted forays into 2.0 technologies. It's easy to get excited about the potential of these new technologies, but it's another to co...

follow that qar!

Search This Blog