Sewing silk purses…

It was a very soggy morning in Estabrook Park, but temps were in the 40s, the winds were light, and critters are on the move, so I eventually dragged myself out to take a look.

The ice on the pond is starting to melt, and here’s the first critter I found taking advantage of the newly opened water around the edges: a muskrat. I bet whatever green stuff it’s nibbling on sure tastes a lot better than whatever it had stored in its burrow for the past couple of months.

I’ve been seeing these guys on-and-off all winter, but today was the first day in a while that a mature bald eagle let me make a portrait.

Despite the bald eagle perched over the upstream island, there were plenty of waterfowl on the water below. Here’s a red-breasted merganser drake, perhaps the same one we saw below the falls on Monday.

Here’s a pair of hooded mergansers floating between the rain drops.

The common mergansers appear to have moved on already, but there were plenty of common goldeneyes still on the river, and here’s a drake.

By the time I got back to the pond, this quartet of mallards had already arrived to sample the freshly opened water.

Back at the river, there were a pair of blackbirds, but they didn’t sound like red-wings, and they didn’t have long tails as grackles do. Instead, they were rusty blackbirds on their way back north. We saw them last, on their way south, back in October. Here’s the one that posed the nicest, and you can just see a little rust on its upper back and breast.

Finally, in the tall grass where I’d been seeing a song sparrow all winter, there was a new bird today, our first swamp sparrow of the year.

Tomorrow is forecast to be sunny, if cold and windy, so here’s hoping that creates some pretty pictures for us.