About as good as it gets…

I didn’t have high hopes for my visit to Estabrook Park this morning. It was cloudy and breezy at sunrise, and neither condition usually makes for great pictures. The critters in the park, however, had other plans.

It all started with this white-tailed deer that I only spotted because I was tiptoeing off trail to pick up a bit of litter that I could see poking through the dead leaves on the ground. She didn’t even budge as I inched toward her, and once I bent down to pick up the piece of plastic, she even resumed munching on the shrubbery. Long-time readers might recall that I spotted my very first deer, almost four years ago, while I was doing the same thing, traipsing off-trail to pick up litter. Ha!

At the pond, the bushes were full of kinglets, and then the sun came out, which really lit things up and finally enabled me to get a decent golden-crowned portrait for the year.

There were even a couple of warblers flitting from branch to branch, and in case any of you are wondering which type this one is, …

it kindly turned around to flash us its namesake “yellow rump.” Ta da! How nice was that?!?

Finally, as I was standing still and holding my camera to my face, a scenario that I’ve hoped for years would occur finally happened. This belted kingfisher landed right in a tree not twenty feet from me, and I didn’t have to startle it by moving or even looking in its direction. Instead, I just slowly rotated my camera toward it and started taking my best kingfisher pictures yet. Yee haw! Oh, and if you are asking yourself, as one does, well is this a male or a female, hold onto your hats, because…

it even turned right around to show us the clean white breast of a male. Unbelievable!

I must have snapped thirty pictures before I figured at least one of them had to be presentable, and then I slowly backed away with my camera still in front of my face, which left the kingfisher undisturbed. Phew! I then slunk off toward the river to see if there was anything else to see.

It turns out, there were plenty of birds to see, and I counted 43 species in total today, but there were no more pictures to be had. Let’s just say that today was a day for quality over quantity.