THE CHANGING SEASONS: OSCILLATIONS 
Figure 10. This male Ruff, which spent 16-23 (here 18) May 2009 at the Madera sewage treatment ponds in Madera County, was the 
Northern California region's first ever for late May. Five Ruffs, three of them well inland, have previously lingered into May in North- 
ern California, one as late as 9 May. Associated with this late date was a high hormonal level that led the bird to display to a nearby 
Black-necked Stilt! Photograph by Gary Woods. 
Figure 1 1 . This Eurasian Teal, present in Newton, Massachusetts throughout the spring 2009 season (here 1 7 March), was paired with 
a hen Mallard — and he defended her aggressively from all interlopers. This subspecies appears to be increasing in both the North- 
east and the Northwest, along with intergrades between the nominate subspecies and the American subspecies carol'mmis, Green- 
winged Teal. Photograph by John Crookes. 
which recalls a similar noise made by Curly 
Howard (Jerome Horwitz) of the Three 
Stooges, when he noticed something interest- 
ing. But these almost-ubiquitous Eurasians 
are only the most conspicuous of escapee-vis- 
itors from the Old World. Ontario and espe- 
cially Michigan and Quebec experienced 
what appeared to be a “flight” of Common 
Chaffinches in May 2009 involving over a 
dozen birds, and European Goldhnches were 
even more widespread in the Midwest and 
southern Canada. While no one suggests that 
these birds were anything other than escaped 
cage birds (from intentional releases in Illi- 
nois?), the matter of provenance may become 
less interesting than the question of the status 
of such species as breeding birds. A Eurasian 
Tree Sparrow at the famous Whitefish Point 
feeders on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula 20 
May would seem to ht a recent pattern of re- 
cent expansion froirr its core range (this sea- 
son involving one in Boone County, Missouri, 
and 12 in Rock Island County, Illinois), but 
one wonders whether some of these birds 
might have been among those birds released 
in Illinois recently? Pour Hooded Crows at 
Beebe Plain, Quebec near the U.S. border 28 
May made a nice counterpoint to Hooded 
Merganser, Warbler, and Oriole in that 
province this season; but if a foursome, wbat 
are the chances that at least one male or one 
female is among them? Pretty good! 
We know that “wild” Eurasian birds occa- 
sionally linger to nest in North America, or at 
least attempt to do so; spring Ruffs (Pigure 
10), which seem to be increasing in the past 
10 years after a few decades of apparent de- 
cline, give rise to hope that the species will 
take root as a permanent breeder in North 
America’s high latitudes. The North American 
Birds network has seen ever-increasing re- 
ports of what we call “Eurasian Teal,” the 
nominate subspecies of Green-winged Teal, 
often called just “Teal” or “Common Teal” in 
other publications. Moreover, reports of inter- 
grade (Eurasian x Green-winged) teal have 
been on the rise, not just in the Pacific North- 
west, which has both keen observers and 
abundant waterfowl, but also in the North- 
east, which reported 20 Eurasians and nine 
intergrades between New Jersey and Nova 
Scotia this spring. Are we simply paying more 
attention to teal, or are more Eurasian Teal 
visiting nowadays? I suspect the latter case is 
true, and with more birds from perhaps both 
the Pacific and Atlantic sides of North Amer- 
ica visiting, intergrade individuals are bound 
to increase. One ambitious Eurasian Teal in 
Massachusetts even laid claim to a female 
Mallard this spring (Pigure 11)1 
Keen eyes 
Keeping our eyes on some uncommon prizes, 
we should commend here not just the ob- 
servers who turned up the marvelous birds 
digested above but also some of the subtler 
and stranger birds of spring 2009. A Magnih- 
cent Hummingbird x Anna’s Hummingbird 
near Eureka, California 2-5 April was surely 
among these, as was a Magnificent Hum- 
mingbird X White-eared Hummingbird hy- 
brid at the famed Davis Mountains Resort, in 
far-western Texas 29 April-1 1 May. See these 
VOLUME 63 (2009) • NUMBER 3 
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