MISQUAH — The bird list has been claimed. Gladys Sandbo of rural Misquah came to the Pilot-Independent’s booth at the fair Thursday afternoon, described a green spiral notebook, said the entries began in the spring of 1994, and said the first bird on the first page was a rose-breasted grosbeak at a feeder on the north side of a house that is no longer there. All three were correct. The notebook went home with her.

It is, she says, and always was, a bird list. She has kept one since 1994. She lost this one in July while walking the shore of the bay, discovered the loss in early August, and did not come forward, she says, because “it was in the newspaper by then and there was a great deal of talk, and I did not care to be the answer to it.”

Asked about the entries that this newspaper’s classified advertisement described, accurately, as “not entirely about birds” — the marginal notes on the condition of vegetation visible across the water, which two letter-writers have spent six weeks alluding to — Sandbo was unbothered. “I write down what I see,” she said. “When you sit on a shore with binoculars for thirty years you see the birds and you also see the far side of the bay. It would be strange to look at a bay and only see one thing in it.”

She confirmed she is not related to either party in the pumpkin correspondence, is a first cousin by marriage to Merle Sandbo of the tractor pull, and has no opinion about giant pumpkins “which I would like printed in those words.” She was, however, at the weigh-in Saturday. She says she goes every year for the birds, the fairgrounds being good for warblers in late August, and that she was as surprised as anybody by what happened at the scale.

The notebook is out of the safe. The good pencils remain.