Still a lot of migration going on…

It turns out that the white sky yesterday was caused by wildfire smoke, but it stayed up high, and a wind out of the west kicked up, so the sky was nice and blue again in Estabrook Park this morning.

My first greeter of the day was this darling palm warbler in the trees west of the soccer fields, and our first palm warbler of the season. The image is so grainy because the sun hadn’t even come over the trees to the east, and so there wasn’t much light yet. Thank goodness they are such good posers.

At the river, I was happy to see the spotted sandpiper was back on the lily pads, and here it is already hard at work before the sun had even reached down into the valley.

I beat the great blue heron to the pond, and there wasn’t much else to see yet, so I headed back to the river. As I was about to cross the parkway, I watched a Cooper’s hawk chase a red-tailed hawk back and forth over the baseball field. The red-tailed eventually swooped into this tree, and the Cooper’s continued on to the river.

At the north end the migrating ducks had moved on, leaving only dozens a mallards and a few geese. The trees on shore, however, were full of little birds, and here’s a female redstart flashing us her distinctive tail feathers. I read that “this seems to startle insect prey and give the birds an opportunity to catch them.”

Here’s a yellow-bellied flycatcher, I believe.

Back at the pond, I finally caught a male redstart in all his black and orange finery.

A great crested flycatcher swooped in to check out the scene, and then quickly moved on.

A black-and-white warbler foraged on branches and trunks as nuthatches do.

The yellow belly on this vireo marks it as another Philadelphia vireo. Compare it to the white-bellied and red-eyed vireo we saw just yesterday.

On this second visit to the pond, I found that the great blue heron had finally arrived, and here it is on break after giving fishing lessons to a couple of photographers on the west lawn again.

On my third visit to the river, the sandpiper was still picking bugs off of the lily pads, but now the sun was high enough in the sky to light up the scene.

Finally, the only butterflies I saw today were fiery skippers, and I just showed you one two days ago, so this green darner will have to serve as your “butterfly” of the day.