Sorry about skipping yesterday’s post, but Bob kept me out taking pictures until it was time to go to the airport, 😉, I didn’t get home from Maine until around 11 pm, and I went straight to bed at that point. The good news is that I made it home safely, the not-so-great news is that it was a rainy morning in Estabrook Park, and the not-so-bad news is that I was able to sneak in and get some pictures before the rains came.
Here’s a very fresh-looking batch of mallard ducklings on the river beside the downstream island, and boy did they act like they were hungry. You’d think they’d spent their whole lives living in a shell until just this morning.
A bit farther upstream and between the two islands, a great blue heron put in a relatively rare appearance, at least for this year so far.
And those are the pretty sights I managed to capture under the thick clouds and before the precipitation started today. Luckily, I’ve still got a few pictures from my trip out east that I haven’t been able to show you yet, and this first one is the first shorebird chick I’ve ever seen, a young piping plover snuggled up under one of its parents on Half Mile Beach in Reid State Park.
There were four of the little rascals, in fact, and here’s one getting the hang of that iconic shorebird behavior of chasing after a wave as it recedes and then fleeing the next one to keep its tootsie toes dry. They look barely larger than two cotton balls stacked atop a couple of toothpicks, but man, they were quick on their feet already!
One odd sight was spotting these four adults getting into quite a kerfuffle. This was just yesterday morning, a Tuesday, so you wouldn’t think that they’d been drinking already, and perhaps it was just about local politics.
The fight did eventually break up, all the parties moved on, and so did Bob and I, but our next fun sight came only a couple dozen yards up the beach. This here is my very first Semipalmated Sandpiper (Calidris pusilla). Long-time readers may be thinking, “didn’t we just see a semipalmated something-or-other in Estabrook just a week and a half ago, that he was all in a dither about?” Well, they’re right, but that “something-or-other” was a “plover”, not a “sandpiper”. See? A completely different small shorebird.
Anyway, I haven’t been able to show you much in the way of mammals from this trip, so here’s a Harbor Seal (Phoca vitulina), if my sources are correct, just off the beach and probably wondering if we don’t have any fish to share. A herring or a flounder, even a hake would do.
I see that tomorrow morning is also forecast to be cool and cloudy, but at least the chance of rain is slight, so maybe I’ll get lucky and have more to show you.
Signs of Life in Estabrook Park 