It was great to be back in Estabrook Park this morning, as always, and the gorgeous weather was just icing on my cake. The sky was clear, the winds were pretty light, and temps were in the mid-twenties: about as perfect as mid-February can get. It looks as though it was cold while we were away because the ice on the river was about as thick as I’ve ever seen it, and the open water is confined to just a few narrow and windy ribbons.
When I first saw the ice, I worried a little that it would be too much for our visiting ice birds, but I needn’t have, and here’s the drake of a goldeneye pair near the south end.
A fun surprise was encountering four deer coming south on the river path. There was one buck with antlers and three likely does without. Two of the does and the buck quickly scampered up the bluff, but the last doe hung out for a second, either out of curiosity or to see if it really had to make the climb or not. I didn’t mind giving it time to make up its mind, but I wasn’t turning around and heading the other way either, so it eventually opted to join its comrades atop the bluff. “Sorry, Sweetie.”
At the next sliver of open water, above the falls, I found our only common merganser of the morning, this wide-eyed hen. My long lens foreshortens distance a bit, but you can get an impression of just how narrow are the gaps in the ice.
Finally, at the northwest end, just downstream of the Port Washington Road bridge, there was a much wider patch of open water, and that’s where the mallards and the Canada geese had congregated, but there was another bird napping on the ice who I initially thought was another common merganser. Upon closer inspection, however, I realized that this was our very first red-breasted merganser of the winter in Estabrook. Woo hoo! Even better, spectacle-wise at least, he’s a drake, and their spiky head feathers rival those of the common merganser hens. Here’s hoping he sticks around for a bit so I can get a better picture.
The birds were oddly quiet around the pond, and I searched in vain for the Cooper’s hawk who I figured must be the cause, but I came up empty. Heck, I couldn’t even catch a woodpecker posing in front of that gorgeous blue sky. Oh well. That leaves me a little room to show you a couple more sights from Nicaragua.
Besides iguanas, we saw plenty of house geckos clinging to interior walls, and this one rose-bellied lizard (Sceloporus variabilis) on the grounds of our hotel on Ometepe. I thought for sure I’d seen one before even if I hadn’t shown you, but I can find no record to that effect, so I suppose this is a handsome new creature for me.
I’ve shown you plenty of doves before, but this is the first presentable picture I’ve managed to capture of a white-tipped dove (Leptotila verreauxi). It gets its name from the white tips on its tail feathers, which isn’t too surprising, but I find it a little interesting that “the eye-ring is typically red in most of its range, but blue in most of the Amazon and northern South America.” Huh.
Finally, here’s yet another butterfly from that hike we took on Sunday in search of petroglyphs. This one is a tiger longwing (Heliconius hecale), and the Wikipedia article on them lists twenty-nine (29!) subspecies. Yikes, that seems like a lot!
Lastly, I’d like to thank Anne for planning such an awesome trip for us again and my sister Deb for coming along and helping us spot such amazing sights.
Signs of Life in Estabrook Park 