The crowd starts to thin…

It sure felt like autumn this morning in Estabrook Park: cool, breezy, and cloudy. Definitely sweater weather.

My first treat of the day was this gray catbird lurking in the bushes above the river. They’ve been scarce lately, and I wasn’t sure if I’d get to see one again until spring.

Farther north and back along the river, I checked up and downstream for great blue herons, but didn’t see any, and then thought to myself, “better check in the trees,” but immediately chuckled because “no heron’s gonna be standing on a branch high in a tree in this wind.’ Happily, I looked up anyway, and look who I found, even standing on one leg, as if to show me just how wrong my assumption was. “Thanks for the reality check!”

At the far north end, I was pleasantly surprised to find a few orange-crowned warblers that haven’t flown south yet.

Out on the water, the pair of wigeons appear to be learning from the mallards and just kept on foraging as I took my best pictures of them yet. Here’s the hen, with the drake behind her.

And here’s the drake really showing off its hint of a green eye stripe.

Finally, as I made my way back south, this female cardinal called from the bushes on the side of the bluff below the beer garden, as if to say, “soon enough, it’ll be just you, me, and some chickadees.” Oof. Anyway, if you click on the image so you can zoom in to full resolution, you can see that she has pretty dark brown eyes.