July goes out on a high note!

The weather this morning in Estabrook Park was about as perfect as I hope to experience. The air was cool, not too damp, and still., and the skies were crystal blue. Then, as if that alone wasn’t enough, we have a surprise visitor at the pond! Check out this young black-crowned night heron. I believe we’ve only ever seen a youngster like this back in 2020. “Welcome to Estabrook, Sweetie! We hope you enjoy the fishing.”

I also enjoyed watching a wood duck hang around, like a puppy at the dinner table, the hooded merganser as it worked to gulp down something it had just caught. The merganser didn’t drop anything that I could see, so the wood duck is just gonna have to catch its own breakfast.

Then I hiked over to the river, and as I checked the re-emerging sandbar below the southern island, I could hear a nearby munching sound, which I figured was a squirrel in a tree with a nut. It turned out, however, to be a beaver in the water with a stick. We haven’t seen the likes of them since June. “Welcome back, cutie! How ya been?”

After I figured I had gotten the best picture of a beaver I was going to get today, I continue north and just before the trail came to a little clearing at the river bank, I flushed a bald eagle by accident, who must have been in a tree overhead working on a fish that it had just caught. The foliage is thick there, and I don’t know how it saw me; it must have ….. Oh, wait, it literally does have eagle eyes. Never mind.

Anyway, since the eagle took its fish with it, and probably wanted to continue enjoying it, it only flew to a tree on the far shore, and here it is.

As if that wasn’t amazing enough, as I scanned the trees with my binoculars to find where the eagle had landed, I also found the osprey! It kept looking over its shoulder, perhaps in hopes that the eagle might leave it some of that fish, but I suspect the chances of that are pretty slim. No one is scoring a free breakfast this morning!

Then, as I started my way back south after counting the geese, mallards, herons, kingfishers, and sandpipers on the river above the northern island, I came across this little house finch who was acting all hesitant to fly, like a recent fledgling, but could fly just fine when I got close enough.

Along my way south, I stopped at the pollinator garden, but found no butterflies today. Instead, there was this striking gold-marked thread-waisted wasp (Eremnophila aureonotata) sipping nectar for itself.

Finally, I didn’t see anyone on the thistles beside the soccer fields, either, but just as I was about to exit the park, I spotted this monarch sampling a burdock blossom in the clump that grows between the Oak Leaf Trail and Wilson Drive.

P.S. ebird got back to me already about the odd bird I saw yesterday and said, “no dice.” They assert, instead, that it was merely “a dark young herring gull.” Oh well. Ya can’t win ’em all, eh?