HI Everyone, I hope this isn’t overuse of the List to ask for help: our banded crow population in and around Ithaca is suffering from the WNV plague—again, and strongly. We are losing tagged and untagged-but-known family members. Since birds also travel to forage at this time of year, we are trying hard to document whether a bird ostensibly “seen looking sick” is really dead. We are collaborating with the Wildlife Health Unit and are able to get them tested to confirm whether they died of WNV.
So—we really appreciate any alerts to crows seen dead or looking sick or “odd” in and near Ithaca, especially around Cayuga Heights, the Cornell Campus, Forest Home area, the Pine Tree-Mitchell-Ellis Hollow areas, Sapsucker Woods road across to Brown and the Airport areas. I am only too happy to investigate a false alarm, rather than miss a sick crow that then “disappears”, cause unknown. It was really helpful that several people alerted us to a dying crow at Boces last week, which I was able to find the next morning. Currently, we are missing purple-tagged (white letters) crows “PC” (just N of Boces) and “SZ” (Lexington-Burleigh area) and an untagged but banded crow in the vicinity of Hanshaw between Kay St and Orchard, within this past week. Up to 5 unbanded crows have disappeared in the last few weeks, after other family members died—along Warren on both sides of 13. Thanks for any help—emails to Kevin or I (best my academic email acl...@binghamton.edu <mailto:acl...@binghamton.edu>) or texts/calls to my cell phone below are all fine. Suzanne Broderick (smb4...@aol.com) will also take the info and make sure reports were investigated. Anne Anne B Clark 147 Hile School Rd Freeville, NY 13068 607-222-0905 anneb.cl...@gmail.com -- Cayugabirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/cayugabirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/Cayugabirds 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/CAYU.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
