Pair bonding in Estabrook Park…

The sun poked through the thick clouds once in a while, but it was mostly a dark and gray morning in Estabrook Park. Once again, one other nature lover joined me for our weekly wildlife walk, but before we met up at the beer garden parking lot, look who I found frantically foraging near the ground beside the pond: one of a pair of late-season golden-crowned kinglets.

There were also about a dozen cedar waxwings high in a tree at the north end of the pond. I would have loved to catch them eating berries, but today was not that day.

At the river, we watched a Cooper’s hawk glide across, and it was kind enough to perch right over us and even called for a while, but nobody answered that we could hear.

The main show for the day, however, was this pair of mature bald eagles over the far riverbank. They were perched apart when we first spotted them, but as I was getting pictures of each, one flew over to join the other, and then the singing began. This was a first for me, and I read that this behavior is likely for pair bonding. You can see that the one to the rear is significantly larger than the one up front, which makes her the female. Here’s a sequence of four images, to give you a taste, and all in WordPress’s “custom HTML” so that if that format works on your email client, you can view them in quick succession.

Here they are again with WordPress’s “embed Flickr”, in case that’s the format your email client prefers. If your email client handles both just fine, then you get to see it twice!

Finally, a third, juvenile bald eagle flew in, perched a bit away and above the pair, and silently looked down on them like a teenager watching their parents dance at a wedding.

The forecast calls for the cloudy skies to continue through Wednesday morning, so here’s hoping that the critters will continue to carry the show until the sun comes back.