Whelp, the recent thaw is over, at least for now, and winter is back with blowing snow and freezing cold. Yippee!
The bigger surprise, for me and the two wildlife walkers who joined me this morning, was finding a pair of cedar waxwings looking for berries in the bushes around the pond. We’re well within their year-round range, but they must know of good berry sources elsewhere, because we don’t get to see much of them during the winter in Estabrook Park.
The next surprise was eventually finding eleven (11!) common mergansers on the river, two drakes and nine hens. Even better, they all lined up so I could get them in one shot. I’m sure that is a record for me.
That’s the whole show for today, however, but it is a huge improvement over the last couple of days, thank goodness. I see that the cold is forecast to deepen by tomorrow morning, but the wind should ease up a bit, and the sun might poke through the clouds, so I have a hope that this trend of improving pictures might continue. Keep your fingers crossed!
Sheesh! As if the lack of critters to photograph lately in Estabrook Park was not enough of a problem, today the fog is still so thick at noon that if a bald eagle perched over the island in the pond, I’m not sure that I could even capture an image of it.
So, this is a perfect opportunity to look back at some of the amazing sights that we did get to see this year, and let’s focus on the Balkans this time. As you may recall, Anne put together a wonderful little tour for us back in January, and these are some of my favorite wildlife pictures from that trip.
Before we started to make our way home, I had one more chance to look for critters outside of the picturesque city of Dubrovnik in Croatia, and I found a male western black redstart who really showed off the black mask they can have, and he almost let me take a portrait with him in it. Boy, they are flighty!
We did see plenty of other wonderful sights during our short visit there, but these are my favorite wildlife pictures, and if you get the chance to visit the Balkans yourself, I hope you don’t hesitate to take it.
The doldrums that seemed to have settle on Estabrook Park lately reached a climax today, and I didn’t even get a single picture, let alone see anything I would have liked to capture on film. Fortunately, it is only a few days until the end of 2025, so it’s a perfect time to start reviewing the highlights of the past year, and let’s start with the bird species we saw in Estabrook for the first time.
It was a gray-on-gray morning in Estabrook Park, with gray fog sandwiched between thick gray clouds and melting gray ice. Sure, gray is technically a color, along with black and white, but I went searching for colors with more saturation.
This nonbreeding herring gull, with pale eyes and legs but a yellow bill and perched on a gray street lamp, was a tiny step in that direction.
I had a hope that this downy woodpecker, appearing to excavate a nesting cavity already, would have the red nape of a male…
but that was not to be.
This white throated sparrow broadened the spectrum a little more, with a rich, brown back, in addition to its yellow lores.
Finally, a male northern cardinal came to my rescue with a whole pallet of red hues. Phew!
I got a late start in Estabrook Park this morning, for reasons, but there were very few other folks there, so I don’t think my tardiness had a negative effect on my wildlife viewing.
Things were pretty quiet at the river, however, so I was counting on the pond to take up the slack, and we got off to a nice start with this male red-bellied woodpecker, who appeared to be looking for something or someone. He wasn’t foraging, basking in the sun, nor calling, which are the activities I usually see them busy at, so I don’t know what he was up to, but he did let me sneak a nice enough picture before he moved on.
Then this mature Cooper’s hawk swooped in, and that was the end of the “little bird” show at the pond. Thankfully, it also let me sneak a nice shot before it made a try for some of the sparrows on the island, and it then bolted off in search of other prey that it might catch off-guard.
Finally, it was time for me to get home for the holiday feast Anne was preparing, and what the woodpecker was doing or what the hawk caught for its own lunch will just have to remain a mystery.
and all through the park, barely a creature was stirring, barely even this mourning dove. I know, I know, and I’d love to even see, let alone photograph for you, a live mouse in Estabrook Park, stirring or not, but I haven’t so far, and I’m not holding my breath. Instead, I haven’t shown you a morning dove yet this month, so here you go.
The sky is starting to haze up a bit now, but it was a beautiful morning in Estabrook Park, with mild temps again, still air, and clear skies for a while.
The first pretty sight I found taking full advantage of the golden sunlight was this common merganser hen up on the ice above the falls to preen with the mallards.
I’ve been seeing two or three crows near the upstream island lately, and this pair appeared to be having a tender moment today.
I didn’t see any other odd ducks on the river, and I did see a Cooper’s hawk at the pond, but it gave me the slip this time. Plus, there was nobody else new or especially photogenic there, despite the beautiful day, so I started heading home.
On my way, I stopped by the southern soccer fields, where I had seen the winter wren yesterday, in hopes that it might let me have a nicer picture today, and I did get a glimpse, but before I could bring my camera to bear, look who showed up instead to chase it away. . I’ve been hearing this character near the same location for much of the fall, and birds of the same species every once in a while for years, but this is the first time one let me sneak a picture here.
Please give a warm Estabrook welcome to the very first Carolina wren (Thryothorus ludovicianus) I’ve ever managed to capture on film in all of Wisconsin, let alone Milwaukee County. I see now that their natural range doesn’t quite extend into the state, which could explain my difficulty.
Wow! It sure is a very gray day in Estabrook Park, but the good news, at least for folks who have been less than thrilled with the recent winter weather, is that the temps are mild, the breeze is very light, and there has been hardly any precipitation at all. Even better, three folks turned up for this morning’s wildlife walk. Yay! It was nice to catch up.
As we started to make our way toward the river, I heard the call a of Cooper’s hawk, and it was pretty high and deep into the woods, but we found it eventually, and here it is. The way the brown of its face seems to bleed onto the top of its white breast makes it look more like the one we saw on Friday, than the one we saw on Wednesday, which would suggest that we’ve got a couple of youngsters coming to the pond to hunt, woo hoo, but I could be mistaken.
When we did finally reach the river, Kathy quickly spotted this bald eagle on the ice for us. Its feathers look wet, and it kept reaching its beak down to the ice or water, but we couldn’t really tell what it was doing. In any case, I was surprised by how long it lingered there after it had spotted us.
Perhaps the reason for its ease was that it had a companion keeping watch from a tree overhead. The one on the ice did eventually fly up into the trees as well, but they didn’t perch together so it was difficult to judge relative size, and I don’t know which was the male and which was the female. Either way, it sure was cool to see the pair again, even if they didn’t serenade us this time.
Finally, folks had to get on with their day, so we parted ways, and I headed back home, but look who I saw along the way: this darling winter wren.
The current forecast calls for tomorrow morning to be a repeat of today’s, so here’s hoping I see as many birds again.
Our recent winter weather roller coaster, at least temperature wise, continued with a plunge back into the teens overnight after soaring into the balmy low forties yesterday afternoon. I arrived at Lakeshore State Park just after sunrise but in time to greet the few solstice revelers who had braved the cold to mark the occasion from front-row seats.
The lagoon isn’t quite completely frozen over yet, and one of the small patches of open water is still attracting goldeneyes, and here’s a drake bathed in the sun’s warm morning glow.
Same for this hen.
As the Milwaukee Birders began to congregate at the south entrance, Helen was the first to notice a pair of kestrels perched high above us on the lights hung from the back side of the American Family Insurance Amphitheater, and she pointed out that they were even posing nicely for me, which they sure were. Here’s the female, and “Thanks, Helen!”
As we circled the park, we found that the American tree sparrows had retired from their usual spot in the tall grass to the willow tree growing out of the riprap at the water’s edge.
Finally, as we recongregated back at the south entrance to wrap things up, it seemed that the male kestrel was unhappy with the photo I had managed of him earlier, so he posed again and against the beautiful blue sky this time. “Thanks, Buddy! I hope you like this one.”
Lastly, the forecast calls for a warmup tomorrow morning, with temps in the low thirties, clouds, and a bit of a breeze out of the south, so not bad for the second half of December in Wisconsin. Based on recent outings, however, I can make no predictions about what we might see on our weekly wildlife walk, so if you want to be among the first to know, come on out and join us.
The skies have cleared up now, but they were pretty dark and cloudy this morning in Estabrook Park. The good news is that the clouds hardly leaked at all, and they rode into town on a warming trend, so it’s 40° now, and it was just below freezing at sunrise.
Things got off to a pretty good start on my walk when I spotted this cutie ambling down the river path ahead of me. It soon tucked into the brush beside the path, and I feared that I might have missed my chance for a picture, but then it climbed into this fork and couldn’t have posed for a nicer image if we had rehearsed it. You may have seen that a raccoon made the news recently, but I’m pretty sure this is a different one.
Farther upstream, I heard a little scamper through the now-exposed leaves on the ground beside the path, and as I looked for the source, it popped its little head out of a hole in the side of a hollow log. As I reached for my camera, it ducked back inside, of course, but I wasn’t in a rush, so I waited a bit, and sure enough, it took another look to see if I was gone.
And then my luck ran out. Oh, I did see 24 bird species for the Estabrook contribution to the Christmas Bird Count, so it wasn’t a total loss, and I did take some lousy shots of the American black duck on the far side of the river and a Cooper’s hawk over the far riverbank, but the distance combined with the low light makes them pretty lackluster, even by my standards, so I’ll spare you.
