A slow day in January

It was a surprisingly quite morning in Estabrook, nowhere near as cold as yesterday, but I still pretty much had the place to myself. Cool. I’d love to see more people out enjoying nature, but I’ll take the solitude when I can get it, too.

I finally almost caught a pair of ubiquitous and surprisingly skittish northern cardinals (Cardinalis cardinalis) feeding on the seeds of a staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina), but not quite. Can you imagine if they had deigned to look my way for a second? Add a blue sky, and we’d really be cooking with gas, right? Sigh, maybe next time.

The merlin is still around, and it apparently got stiff enough, waiting patiently in the top of a tall tree on an island in the river without the crows giving it a hard time as I hiked north all the way to Hampton and back, that it felt the need to stretch out. Pretty bird, eh?

Finally, the mergansers have moved on, at least for the moment, but the American black duck is still hiding in plain sight amongst the mallards. Clever bird, I’d say.

And them’s the tiddlywinks for today.