A late summer or early fall sampler…

The weather in Estabrook Park this morning was like a poor photocopy of yesterday’s. Sure, it was a bit warmer, which the mosquitos took full advantage of, but there was a bit more breeze, and there’s a lot of something in the atmosphere, which makes the sky look milky white. Oh well, at least it wasn’t raining.

Happily, my first treat came early when a tiny missile shot over my shoulder as I passed by the southern soccer fields. My first guess was “hummingbird!”, but then I didn’t have to guess because it parked barely 30 feet in front of me. It preened for a bit, let me take a couple of pictures, stuck out its tongue, and then took off like a shot. My camera sure could have used more light, as is often the case, but that’s still a mighty fine way to start the morning. Right?

The warblers are still pretty scarce, but at the north end by the river I did manage to get my clearest shot of a magnolia warbler this fall, even with that darn branch in the way.

The big surprise at the north end came after I climbed back up the bluff, thought I had just gotten the best black-and-white warbler picture I was going to get today, and used my binoculars to check the robins perched high in a dead tree, just in case. But wait just a second! That’s no robin! That handsome bird is a male American kestrel, whom we might have just seen on Saturday, but from a lot farther away. Even better, a second one soon swooped in, perhaps a brother, upon which this first one immediately took off. Why the robins weren’t flipping out and a kingfisher didn’t fly up to see what all the fuss was about, is anybody’s guess.

Soon after the second kestrel took off to follow the first, the black-and-white warbler reappeared and let me get an even nicer picture than before and perhaps the nicest one I’ve gotten of these little acrobats in quite a while.

By then it was time to start heading back south, and I’m sure glad I did because I might have missed this cutie if I had dawdled any longer. It was foraging with its mom again, and its fur is still full of burrs, but there wasn’t a parking lot between us, so I was able to get a much nicer picture this time.

I had barely turned around to continue my way south when I spotted another furry darling. This picture certainly isn’t the sharpest chipmunk picture I’ve ever captured, but I don’t believe I’ve seen one in the park before so bold as to stop and scratch an itch before bolting out of sight.

I did see one dragonfly today, in the burdock beside the soccer fields, and this one turns out to be a gorgeous black saddlebags.

I also saw just one butterfly, this monarch on the unopened goldenrod in the pollinator garden.

Finally, the work on reshaping the falls continues, and you can see they’ve moved the piles of broken limestone that were in the picture on Saturday. Now they are combined into one big pile on the far shore, which you can just see an excavator working on at the left edge of this picture.

I’ve been asked how they get the equipment to the work site, and so here’s a picture of a second excavator wading through the water at the edge of the falls to get inside the partial cofferdam and resume chipping away at the limestone. That is a huge hydraulic jack hammer it has mounted on the end of its arm. The WordPress rendering of the images above are not too bad, but the one below is of particularly low resolution, so if you want a clearer view, go ahead and click on it so you can see and zoom in on the full-resolution image on flickr.

Lastly, at the instructor orientation yesterday for the North Shore School for Seniors, I was a little surprised that more than one person asked me if it was okay to share this blog with others. I really appreciate that they were keeping the cat in the bag, so to speak, in case that is what I wanted, instead of the proverbial harder-to-undo alternative, but let me be perfectly clear and tell you what I told them. Please feel absolutely free to share this as far and wide as you wish. You may share the URL and tell folks to visit the site or subscribe, or you may forward the email versions of my posts that you receive if you subscribe. I get paid the same either way, so don’t be shy. The more the merrier!