It has mostly clouded up now, as I write this, but the nice weather we’ve been enjoying in Estabrook Park was still pretty much holding this morning for our Weekly Wildlife Walk. Three folks met me for the 7am start, and another four joined us at 8am.
Our first treat came early when we spotted this little flycatcher busily hunting high over the field just northwest of the beer garden. We had just seen a phoebe at the pond, so that was our first guess, but it was hunting much higher than I’ve ever seen phoebes. The current consensus among my sources is that this is a late (thus “rare”) wood-pewee. Now we’re just waiting for the fine folks at ebird.org, where we log our sightings, to confirm.
Our next big treat came at the river, across from the upstream island, when an osprey flew by with a big fish in tow and perched on a bare branch just a bit upstream of us. Luckily, two of the 8-amers had already joined us by then, so they got to see it, too. As a consolation, I suppose, the second two spotted a groundhog, which I have only managed to see twice in the park, on their way to joining us at the north end.
With all eight of us assembled, we headed back south and found a bonanza of brown creepers, a couple of black-and-white warblers, and a few ruby-crowned kinglets having a feeding frenzy right near where we had seen the wood-pewee. Here’s one of the warblers, …
and here’s one of the kinglets. I don’t mean to sound like a whiner, but the WordPress renderings of all these pictures doesn’t match what I see on flickr, so if you want to enjoy the full effect, you know what to do. Plus, you only need to click on one image, or this link, and then you can scroll through all of them on flickr.
When we got back to the parking lot, some of the 8-amers, who had arrived after we had already visited the pond, wanted to see the yawning grebe, so we headed over for seconds. The grebe was indeed there, as were a dozen or more wood ducks, but it wasn’t until everyone left, and I stuck around to try for another nice grebe portrait, that it had some luck rustling up some breakfast. Here it is with a nice big crayfish, …
and here it is with that crayfish mostly down its throat tail first. Wow! Don’t try this at home, kids! Perhaps that yawn wasn’t out of sleepiness, but instead was more like an athlete’s stretch before the big event.
Now, for the insect portion of our program. Just as we were wrapping up with the creepers, warblers, and kinglets, I spotted what will probably be our last black saddlebags dragonfly of the season. As soon as I saw it approach one of the fruit trees by the parking lot, I began chanting to myself “land, land, oh please, land.” And then, miracle of miracles, it actually did.
Finally, as I was taking yet one more picture of a sunlixt monarch butterfly on a Mexican sunflower blossom with a little blue sky for a background, yet another late season surprise, this gorgeous buckeye, flew in and landed at knee level on some black-eyed susans.
Lastly, Lisa was kind enough to forward me a picture she snuck of us all trying to ID some tiny bird.
Signs of Life in Estabrook Park 