The transformation to traditional fall weather continued this morning in Estabrook Park, and by 7am it wasn’t even clear if the sun was going to bother rising at all today. Luckily, my fears were exaggerated, as usual, and the sun did manage to rise, so I went to go see who I could see.
With the way things have been going lately, and the conditions today, I wasn’t expecting much, so I was quite pleasantly surprised to find a slew of little birds in the weeds and trees in and around the meadow beside the river at the north end. Getting any to sit still for a moment is a separate trick, but I did manage it at least with this handsome white-throated sparrow.
Speaking of surprises, look who I found when I checked on the pigeons at the Port Washington Road bridge. One of these four is not like the others. Can you spot which one I mean? Lest you think it’s a white barbary dove that escaped from some magician’s act, I checked the eye, and the iris is pink, so this is likely a true albino feral rock pigeon. Wilder still is the assertion made by Alfredo Begazo, Ph.D. on his Avian Report website that an albino is much rarer, just 1 in 30,000 birds, than an escaped, leucistic dove. Ha!
Finally, back to the meadow, it appears that we received a new shipment of ruby-crowned kinglets overnight because they seemed to be everywhere, and here’s one of the little darlings hunting bugs in the low weeds.
Oh, and I did find out today what happened to those rusty blackbirds I ordered, or at least one of them. It got delivered to a different photographer! I encountered her by the river, and when we discussed what we had seen, she reported a strange dark bird that she didn’t recognize, so clearly nothing she was expecting. When she showed me the picture she had gotten, I recognized it right away, and I immediately ran back to where she said she saw it, but it had already moved on. Dang. Well, at least someone got to see one, and I certainly can’t begrudge her that.
