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A York resident recently took a train out of Lancaster. As she walked through Amtrak's parking lot, Ann Pettigrew heard something unexpected.
"There was a lot of noisy calling going on at the far end of the parking lot," she told others tapping into the Pennsylvania birds list at Audubon.org. "At first I thought there might be a family of kestrels, but they didn't sound quite right."
Then she thought they might be parrots.
Then she asked for help.
Lancastrian Chuck Chalfant responded that what sounds to him like a falcon is actually a recording of a bird.
The recording plays from a speaker on a billboard structure that hovers over the Route 501 bridge at the far end of a Brubaker Chrysler-Jeep parking lot off McGovern Avenue.
The parking lot is across McGovern from Brubaker's headquarters. It's adjacent to the Amtrak station's parking lot.
A Brubaker spokesman told Chalfant that the avian recording is intended to keep real birds from besmearing the shiny new Jeeps in the parking lot with their droppings.
Staff writer Ad Crable, who read this speculative exchange on the Audubon Web site, suggested that the Scribbler investigate the mechanism being used to frighten off our fine feathered friends.
OK, Bill Durkota, president of Brubaker, reports that Lamar Advertising erected the billboard structure at least 15 years ago.
Crows and other birds began roosting on the billboard and letting loose on the Jeeps below.
Brubaker officials complained. They wanted Lamar to resolve the problem or remove the billboard.
So Lamar put a stuffed owl on the billboard to scare away littler birds. That didn't work.
So Lamar wrapped wire on the structure to keep the birds from roosting. That didn't work.
Then came the recording.
Does it work?
"I guess it does," says Durkota. "The birds have moved from the billboard to the high wires in that lot."
So what kind of bird sound is being played and replayed, with hardly a break, day after day, night and day, year after year, maybe forever.
Tom Loper, general manager of Lamar Advertising's regional office in Wrightsville, says he's "not one hundred percent sure, but we might guess it's a crow, although it almost sounds like a squirrel."
Loper says the recording was installed before he arrived and probably resulted from a suggestion in a billboard-industry newsletter.
It's the only bird recording of its kind on any Lamar billboard structure in central Pennsylvania.
There may be good reason for that.
The raucous recording has not driven all birds from the parking lot, but it is definitely annoying, or at least mystifying, all birders who ride trains out of Lancaster.
Gerald Lestz's final almanac
At the memorial service for Gerald S. Lestz on Sept. 20 &tstr; a warm and sunny afternoon &tstr; it was noted that the weather did not agree with the prediction in Baer's Almanac.
Baer's, which Lestz edited for 62 years, had predicted unsettled weather, with light showers in the Northeast.
Baer's hasn't always been perfect in its weather prognostication, but it usually has been right on the money in the Miscellaneous Information Department.
Collecting interesting trivia for the almanac was one of the many specialties of Gerry Lestz, local historian, cultural leader and previous Scribbler of this column.
The 2010 edition of Baer's has just been released and it is full of all the fascinating facts that Lestz could cram into it before he died last month at age 95.
Who invented the whistling teakettle?
What kind of weather follows the loud howl of a peacock?
You'll find the answer in Baer's, available in stores or from the publisher, John Baer's Sons, Box 328, Lancaster, Pa. 17608.
Baer's was founded in 1817 by John Baer's Sons. Lestz's daughter, Linda Lestz Weidman, is carrying on the tradition.
Contact The Scribbler: jbrubaker@lnpnews.com or 291-8781.
