[Tweeters] And now please: A standing OVATION for the RF Bluetail and Nancy Morrison!!!

[Ed Newbold]

Hi All,

Those of us who remember back to the first days of theBluetail stakeout recall a skittish bird, empty-handed birders and some angryneighbors. Nancy Morrison stepped in and made changes in the stakeout designand her approach had a method: address the bird’s needs first.

As Frank Caruso wrote to me, “Nancy certainly gets as much credit as possible for being the mostgracious of hostesses. She should also get credit for being an excellentproblem solver. She realized that the hordes of birders roaming around theyards and neighborhood were negatively impacting the behavior of the bird andsome of the neighbors. She fixed the problem by keeping birders out of theneighboring vacant lot. The bird then returned on a regular basis to her yard.When that happened, she created the area where we saw the bird yesterday. Thatresulted in increased reliability in seeing the bird and birders only parkingby her house and going into her yard. She totally solved all of the issues.”

In the ensuing days the LFP Bluetail stakeout becamearguably, in the limited memory of Delia and me, a stakeout for the ages. Itdidn’t hurt that this bird may actually hold the title of “World’s mostadorable bird.” We know it has a ton of competition, but it’s in the hunt forsure.

 

Nancy has put her link to her blog which includes one movieof the Bluetail which we thought was far superior to "The Godfather" oreven “Citizen Kane” and doesn’t take as much of your precious time. If anyonehasn’t gone to this link and watched this movie, it is here:

https://naturebynancy.zenfolio.com/blog/2022/3/red-flanked-bluetail---her-final-days-in-lake-forest-park

 

So thank you Nancy! Delia and I are standing and clapping,here in our living room.

 And thanks to the enchantinglittle blue-tailed bird from Asia—Good Luck!!! 

Ed Newbold and Delia Scholes

 

PS. Still unresolved is how to monetize a stakeout. We can’tin the future expect that every homeowner is going to be a brilliant, committedNature-lover who incidentally has control over her own schedule like Nancy. If wecan hold ourselves open to any ideas involving remuneration of hosts, it mightbe to our advantage in the future. Duck hunters have lost some of the highground in recent times but their original idea of stepping up and makingthemselves pay to enjoy their sport led to them to become an extraordinarily effectivegroup of conservationists. If we could give private landowners an incentive tohave rare birds on their land, birds and birders could both be thebeneficiaries in the long run.

 

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