Everything in bright red I've added to the map. The map isn't really as up to date as 1998 because the new dam is still "under construction" on the map. Much of what is shown as land north of the "road on levee" is now under the water of Ellis Bay. However, on the day that the Whimbrels appeared, the water level was low because the dam was wide open. The Whimbrels were near the shoreline, as it existed on May 25, 2003, which was a bit south of the shoreline as depicted on the map. While we were birding by the blind at the east end of Ellis Island on the morning of the 25th on Bill Rowe's field trip, I entered waypoints into my GPS receiver twice. I did the same when we returned in the afternoon, so I had 4 waypoints for the same location. Although I was standing in essentially the same place each time, the two most distant points, as recorded, were 115 feet apart. The point (red +) labeled blind is the average location. I entered the coordinates that my GPS receiver recorded* (the average of 4 points, actually) into the TopoZone web site and the site software plots the +. The link to actual website map is in the table below. While watching both Whimbrels in the afternoon from the blind, I saw some trucks in the parking lot by the dam on a line of site over the heads of the Whimbrels. Later, I went to the parking lot and found the location near the trucks that was on the line-of-site (red line on map), or as close as I could estimate. That location is labeled PL. It could easily be 100 feet in error. The parking-lot point was 0.93 miles from the blind. So, the Whimbrels were somewhere along the red line. I believe that they were in the ellipse, judging by our position along the road (which I didn't record) when we viewed them from the south. I am almost certain that they were not as far east as the state line, however, so I conclude that they were in Missouri.
On May 25 I also entered waypoints twice at the "state line" sign along the gravel road to the dam. That point (sign on map) is ~80 meters southwest of the line as depicted on the map. If the sign is placed correctly, then the line is not drawn correctly on the topographic map. If the map is correct, then the sign is in the wrong place (but close enough for government work). I believe that the TopoZone software is reasonably accurate because waypoints I took on a previous trip while parked on Riverlands Way (alias, "road on levee") at the observation tower and near Heron Pond plot right on the road as depicted on the map (click on the two last links in the table above). Randy Korotev * While taking the waypoints, my GPS receiver (Garmin III+) was set to WGS 84 datum and lat-long. I switched it to NAD 27, as used by TopoZone, and entered the resulting UTM coordinates in the web site. |