The cold brings us one more FOS.

It was yet another beautiful morning in Estabrook Park, and the open river water near the south end attracted another first-of-the-season bird for us. This one is a female goldeneye, and it’s a shame the drake from Saturday didn’t stick around to meet her. She was quite skittish, and this is as close as she let me get. If you click on the picture to see the original image on flickr, you can zoom in to see that her eye is indeed golden.

I didn’t see a critter that I hadn’t already shown you this week until I was walking back south from the pond and this hairy woodpecker perched just overhead.

It appears he just wanted a bit of that frozen snow. I read that cold weather is dehydrating.

Speaking of frozen, all this cold has created some amazing hoar frost on any open ice. It’s on the river, the pond, and this is a little patch on the stream that runs between them. Those flakes are about the size of postage stamps, if you are familiar with that technology.