The fine weather trend continued this morning in Estabrook Park, with calmer winds, warmer air, and about the same mostly-blue sky. It was warm enough that I even heard a cicada make one more valiant effort to attract a mate.
I’m mostly over my jet lag, so I was able to get into the park fully-caffeinated and about twenty minutes earlier than yesterday, and I arrived at the pond in time to catch this belted kingfisher watch the sun start to shine through the trees to the east.
The wood ducks and pied-billed grebe are still there, but the bigger surprise today was when this Cooper’s hawk swooped in and perched right at eye level. I did my best to keep my face covered by my camera, and it took a while, but I get the impression that the hawk finally noticed me standing on shore.
You may recall that I didn’t see any warblers yesterday, but I didn’t take that to mean that they had all flown south already. Well, today I present to you exhibit 1: a darling little female common yellowthroat lurking in the low brush beside the river at the north end.
Along with the sparrows I showed you yesterday, another member of the next migrant wave is this brown creeper, who was kind enough to line up with a little bit of blue sky shining through the foliage behind it.
Back at the south end, as I checked the weeds for butterflies, I was pleasantly surprised to find another warbling straggler, which I call “exhibit 2”: this sharp-looking palm warbler hungrily picking seeds or bugs, I couldn’t tell which, from some gone-by thistle.
Meanwhile, this eastern phoebe was definitely hunting for bugs right behind me.
The highlight of the morning, however, at least for me, was finding this beauty hiding in the low brush nearly right between the warbler and the phoebe. For those of you who don’t recognize it, and why would you because I’ve never managed to show you one before, this is the elusive yellow-billed cuckoo (Coccyzus americanus), and the yellow eye-ring suggests that it’s a youngster.
Even as I write this, I can’t believe my luck to have not only gotten to see one, finally, but that I also managed to capture a presentable image I can show you. Yee haw! I wouldn’t quite call it a portrait, but if you click on the image so you can view it in flickr and zoom in to the full resolution, you should be able to see the dark-brown iris that I can see inside that yellow eye-ring.
Finally, I did see a couple of monarchs on the Mexican sunflowers again, but to keep things from getting too monotonous, here’s a pretty clouded sulpher butterfly on either some hairy white oldfield aster or some arrow-leaved aster.
The forecast for tomorrow morning is for more of the same, so I can’t wait to see who I find next.
Signs of Life in Estabrook Park 