A day of consolation prizes…

It was indeed another beautiful summer day in Estabrook Park, but I must have used up my luck yesterday because I didn’t have a whole lot today.

I did see these bucks crossing the river, and there was even a third one, but they were going the other way, so I mostly got their backsides.

I couldn’t find the young yellow-crowned night heron, although someone else did after I moved on, and there were no other new birds on the river today, but this solitary sandpiper did let me have a pretty nice picture.

The mallard hen with a brand-new batch of ducklings seemed more at ease this morning and let me get a real nice look.

I stopped by the pond a second time, in hopes that perhaps the heron had moved up there, but that was not the case. Instead, one of the belted kingfishers was there and we watched it catch a tasty-looking little fish.

Since I wasn’t having much luck in Estabrook, I decided to give Sheridan Park, where a least bittern was photographed recently, a try, but my mediocre luck followed me. I and a bunch of other hopefuls did manage to see a bittern take a short flight from one hiding spot in the reeds to another, but that was it. My consolation prize was this green heron, which we haven’t seen much of in Estabrook for a while.

The butter on my bread turned out to be the chicks that the green heron had safely hidden away on a pine branch over the water. Nice.

I saw my first red-spotted purple of the year yesterday on the cup plant blossoms at the back of the pollinator garden, but it was very shy and kept itself obscured by leaves. I saw one again today, and it wasn’t obscured, but if you look closely at what it is sipping from, you might wish it was. Perhaps it’s on a “fermented food” kick.

It looks like the showers forecast for tomorrow aren’t due to arrive until the afternoon, so here’s hoping that my luck improves.