[va_co_birding] Re: County listing in the Chesapeake Bay

Hey Larry,
Not sure how many people are still on this list.  

It seems very logical to me that islands 1&2 are in Virginia Beach, and 
islands 3&4 are in Northampton.  The line would be somewhere on the span 
between 2 
and 3. 

There's some belief that there is no county on the islands; that the CBBT is 
it's own entity.  While possibly true, I don't think it's entirely true.  If 
you get pulled over for speeding and take it to court, or need an ambulance, or 
die out there, one of the two jurisdictions at either end of the bridge will 
become involved.  But what people miss when they're talking about this is that 
even if the CBBT was it's own jurisdiction, it would only cover the span and 
the islands, and not the water.  Many of the birds we get out there are on or 
over the water.  

As for birding from Smith Point, it's as complicated as birding from any 
location that has a line that goes over water.  Mike Stinson and I sat at South 
Holsten Lake for eight hours because we wanted to be particularly certain that 
the grebes would swim into Virginia.  You take two points on land that you know 
are the line between jurisdictions, and extend the line drawn from those 
points to some point across the water, and hope for the best.  

Rivers are another issue in Virginia.  Not all of them have the boundary in 
the middle.  The Rappahannock in Fredericksburg is a bit of a mess, there are 
places where the county line nearly hugs the shoreline (according to my USGS 
map of the area).  There are places where two rivers merge and involve county 
lines, and those are clearly a leap of faith, pretending to know how far over 
water the line is, and thinking that we can tell the difference between 300 and 
400 yards, or worse, 800 and 1000 yards.  It's insane is what it is.  

The of course there's the Potomac....

tmd

---------------------------------------
Todd Michael Day
Jeffersonton, Virginia, USA
Culpeper County
BlkVulture@xxxxxxx
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