Well, my whining about the weather has somehow failed to improve the situation, and the radar forecast suggests that it will be raining all morning. Sure, I could go to Estabrook Park, because I won’t melt, but if I see a bird, and I can’t take a picture of it to show you, did the bird ever really exist? That’s a risk I don’t want to take.
Thus, I’ve scrounged the darkroom floor for negatives that I never printed, and first up is the other one of the two hooded mergansers on the beach at Lakeshore State Park on Sunday. That’s quite the stance, eh?
Because the look of their head feathers is so variable, depending on how they hold them and how wet they are, I can’t tell if this is the same bird or not, but either way, it caught a nice fish, which a gull promptly tried to steal but without success.
Besides the dozen or so cormorants fishing in the water along with the mergansers, here’s a flight of them heading south along the lakeshore.
Here’s a lone herring gull standing amongst a flock of ring-billed gulls at McKinley Beach. Herring gulls weigh about twice as much, so when they are near each other, it is pretty easy to see which is which, even if you can’t get a good look at their bills. You can also just make out the black head on the Caspian tern in the upper left corner.
From further back, here’s another look at the female/immature male black-chinned hummingbird from Sedona. From this angle you can easily see that its tail does not extend beyond its wings and so it can’t be a ruby-throated.
Here’s another look at the female/immature male Anna’s hummingbird, also from Sedona. If you compare the pictures, you’ll see that it is perched in a slightly different spot on that branch, and that is because it had just flown up to grab an insect from the air and then came back down to nearly but not exactly the same spot.
From even further back, here’s another look at the chestnut woodpecker from Amazon Antonio’s Lodge in Brazil.
Here’s another look at the yellow-throated woodpecker from our hike into the forest from the same lodge.
Finally, for a little splash of color to brighten the morning, here’s another look at the clouded sulphur on a purple aster along the Oak Leaf Trail from Saturday afternoon.
Signs of Life in Estabrook Park 