Some sights I didn’t expect on the 4th, and some I should have.

The weather was about as perfect as I can imagine for a couple of hours in Estabrook Park this morning. The sky was clear and blue, the air was nearly still, and the temperature was 70°F. Plus, holiday traffic was very quiet that early. The critter traffic was also pretty quiet, however, and I didn’t get my first picture until I was checking on the swallows under the bridge at the far north end. There were a few cedar waxwings there, too, which we’ve seen before, and as I tried in vain to get one lined up for a picture, look who was busy digging her breakfast out from under the bark of a dead ash tree right behind them: a female hairy woodpecker.

The beaver were keeping in the deep shadows again, so I continued back south, and look who I found beside the path I had just come up not twenty minutes before: another mid-sized snapping turtle on the move.

They have such pretty eyes, …

fierce-looking claws, and …

cute little tails.

Just above the falls, a great blue heron was taking a sun bath.

Below the falls, near the abandoned bridge abutment, there was a commotion in the trees across the river. It wasn’t crows this time, but instead jays, grackles, blackbirds, and even robins joined in the fray. There must have been two to three dozen birds hopping from branch to branch and making a ruckus, all in an effort to get this great horned owl to move on, which it eventually did, but not before giving us a look with those big yellow eyes.

Back at the pond, it was time for the black bullhead fry to hatch, and this is just a small fraction of the entire school.

On my last pass by the river, I was pleasantly surprised to spot a young or female hooded merganser had stopped by. I wonder how long it will stick around.

Back up on the bluff, here’s a male common whitetail basking in the sun on the same railing I found one exactly three years ago.

Finally, at the weeds beside the soccer fields, I found a very green eastern pondhawk, so our first female, and …

one more buckeye, but up on a flower for a change.