A roller coaster of a morning…

It was an odd morning for me in Estabrook Park. The weather was about the same as the past few days, with plenty of clouds and mild temps, but the park was packed with runners for some big group run, so I wasn’t seeing much. Then I opted to walk around the east side of the pond, to avoid the crowds, and I was rewarded by the sight of this yellow-bellied sapsucker, a male by the look of that little red patch under his chin, and he was even showing some yellow on his belly. I read that “juveniles have a brownish wash over their bodies“, so that probably explains the drab pair we saw on Monday.

Okay, so maybe my visit wouldn’t be so bad after all. Then I spotted not just one, but two Cooper’s hawks at the northeast corner of the pond. They made some unsuccessful tries for the squirrels on the ground, but perhaps they were too distracted by each other to give the squirrels the attention they needed.

Anyway, here’s the bigger one, so probably a female, with some fairly bright yellow on her beak and feet.

And here’s the smaller one, so probably a male, with much paler yellow, almost white, on his beak and paler eyes and feet.

Here he is again in a different pose on the same branch.

That’s our fifth raptor of the week, after the osprey, merlin, and eagle on Wednesday, and the red-tailed hawks yesterday. Awesome!

After all that excitement, I hiked over to the river. On my way, I was pleasantly surprised to find the crowd of runners were all off running somewhere else, but when I reached the falls, I was disappointed to find a full dozen anglers plying the waters, so I was unlikely to see anything there. At the north end, where there are usually dozens of mallards and geese foraging in the shallow water around the islands, with maybe a surprise or two sprinkled in for good measure, there was yet another angler wading around, so there were hardly any birds left to be found. Darn.

On shore, however, warblers were everywhere! Hurray! Here’s a not-great image of a female or immature blackpoll warbler, but it at least includes a hint at the pretty foliage starting to emerge.

There were also yellow-rumps, redstarts, magnolias, Nashvilles, waterthrushes, and even a Wilson’s, but I couldn’t get another good picture to save my life. Maybe they had all just arrived last night from up north, and so were far too hungry to sit still for even a second. Oh well. You can’t win’em all, right? At least we had the Cooper’s.