It was a dark and dreary morning, and the best chance I had for a decent picture were big birds out in the open, so here they are.
At the pond, the wood duck hen with two ducklings was feeling confident enough in their evasive abilities to bring them up onto the west lawn, probably in hopes that I was one of the guys that feeds them. “Sorry, sweetie. That ain’t me.”
In the image above, the duckling on the left is starting to show his male cheek pattern, and the one on the right is not, so my guess is that she’s a female, and her white eyering will come in with her breeding plumage next spring. In any case, here’s a close up of her stretching her wing, which looks like it is starting to grow flight feathers.
There was also a pair of mallards on the pond, of which this is the hen, and when they came up on the lawn, I was surprised to watch the wood duck hen shoe them away from her ducklings, and they yielded. I guess what they say is true: it is not the size of the duck in the fight, but the size of the fight in the duck.
At the north end, we had a Cooper’s hawk fly in and perch for a few moments over the northern island before taking right back off again. That’s nearly the same spot the falcon chose on Wednesday, a clear favorite with raptors.
Coop was too small, perhaps, to spook the ducks on the water, and here’s a mallard hen with two of her three fresh-looking ducklings going about their business as usual.
Meanwhile, another mallard hen with her seven nearly-grown ducklings where busy preening on the shore of the island, …
until something made them all snap to attention, but I never discovered what that was.
Finally, the killdeer must have been celebrating the fourth a bit early because there were ten (10!) of them on the sand bars just northeast of the northern island. Even though most appeared to be just standing around, I couldn’t get them all to stand around together, and this trio, with a fourth in the foreground, is as close as I could get. Oh well. Still a sight to see.
Signs of Life in Estabrook Park 