Four ways critters find love

We never see this in the Chesapeake; they migrate out. But the the late 80s and early 90's we had HUIGE rafts of Ruddys adjacent my Cove. On the Patuxent's St Leonard Creek. There were thousands, and sometimes hunters (how nice of them) would run their boats down the creek to drive flocks of these birds together farther along. The easier to bag birds when they burst from the water in dense numbers. This sounded like distant thunder and I always though this might have been like what the colonists saw and heard centuries ago.

This lasted just a couple years, and we've never seen these numbers again. I've a couple 35 MM slides of these flocks but too far away to identify. I always shared these sightings with Steve Funderburk, who was then at USFWS in Annapolis and one of the authors of a broad wildlife assessment we did in those years. Rich Batiuk will remember him.