Another sure sign of spring…

We had a nearly perfect March morning in Estabrook Park today. The sky was clear, the air was still, and it froze overnight but temps were quickly on their way to the 40s, which I hear is good for making the sap flow. Anyway, sorry about missing yesterday. I had a string of non-park activities in the morning, didn’t get into Estabrook until midafternoon, and I was just too tired by the time I got back home to write anything up.

It was a bit gloomy yesterday afternoon, but I did manage one nice picture, of this red-breasted merganser drake on the river below what’s left of the falls.

The biggest treat of this morning, besides the weather itself, was spotting my first daffodil shoots of the season beside the river path and upstream of the islands, where the side of the bluff faces south.

I found another Cooper’s hawk today, but this one let me have only one shot, with a stick right across its face, but at least you can see that gorgeous yellow eye.

There were no new sights at the islands or the pond, but I did get a pretty nice hairy woodpecker at the far south end.

By happy coincidence there was a downy woodpecker nearby, too. Even better, these two pictures give me an excuse to show you one more difference between them, if you can’t see the difference in size nor the difference in relative beak length. A third option is that the white feathers on the edges of a hairy’s tail are solid white, while the white feathers on the edges of a downy’s tail have black checks, and you can just see two of them in the bottom right of the picture below.

Lastly, it was such a nice day that I ventured across the river to check the far side of the islands to see if some early wood ducks might be hiding there again, but I had no luck with that today. Instead, check out the odd sight I saw on the side of the Holliday Inn building. That is a male house sparrow peeking out at us from the inside of an old cliff swallow nest. I guess “house sparrow” doesn’t really specify what kind of house, does it?

The forecast for tomorrow calls for showers all morning, but the precipitation amounts are pretty low, so maybe I’ll be able to sneak some pictures between the rain drops. Keep your fingers crossed!