Yet another big bird!

Skies were cloudy at sunrise again, so I took my sweet time getting to the park, and this handsome devil was waiting along the river trail to welcome me. How’s that for an auspicious start?

The next fun sight was this little cutie enjoying a muskrat’s breakfast at the river’s edge just a bit south of the abandoned bridge abutment. As before, I watched it make a couple of sorties onto shore for more helpings before a big flight of geese coming down river and honking as they came scared it into hiding.

As I approached the falls, this other gaggle of geese arranged themselves nicely in the reflected light upstream.

I reached the two islands just in time to catch these two crows enjoying a fish they found in the middle of the river. Could be salmon. There are a few of them littering the length of the river these days.

From there, I could see Lisa upriver at the boat launch, so I headed her way to hear what she had found this time. We thought it might be our osprey, but it turns out to be a young eagle instead.

We weren’t the only ones to notice it, either. The mallards had all already made themselves scarce, and these four crows took the fight right to the eagle.

When I thought I had the best eagle picture I was gonna get, I went looking for the bufflehead from yesterday, and sure enough, she was right where I left her.

Suddenly, she started paddling upstream as I’ve never seen before, and when I took my eye away from the viewfinder, I could see why. The eagle had finally had enough of the crows and came our way before it headed back north. Let’s hope we get to see a lot more that that one in the coming months.

On my way back south, I encountered a big group coming north at the boardwalk. They call themselves the “Sunday Birders”, Katie, who had tipped me off to the bufflehead just yesterday, was in the lead, and long-time reader Donna was deep in the pack.

I would have loved to tag along, but I had an event to get to, so continued south, and as I passed the wide and slow part of the river, where the stream from the pond empties in, I finally got a chance to capture this sweetie, who I’d been hearing all morning.

And that’s all she wrote for this morning. Best of all, the forecast for tomorrow morning looks fantastic, if a little cool and breezy, so let’s hope for some nice blue-sky backgrounds.