After an exciting day of riding, we made it to Smoky Hollow Campground outside of Lodi, WI.
The excitement came in the form of rain, on and off all day, riding down State Street and around the State Capitol in Madison, braking a shift cable on our tandem, and finally hitting hills worthy of the Horribly Hilly or Dairyland Dare.
But, we’re here now, and the nephews are scheming a good route for tomorrow.
Finally, happy Father’s Day to all the dads out the, including my own. “I hope you had a great one, Dad, and sorry I wasn’t there to celebrate with you.”
It was a little warmer this morning than yesterday in Estabrook Park, and the breeze was a little lighter, but the clouds and wildfire smoke still kept the sun from warming things up to summer-time temps.
Nevertheless, critters gotta eat, and so my first treat of the morning was this female northern flicker digging something, probably pavement ants, out of a crack in the asphalt of the paved path.
I did see a kingbird this morning, probably even this kingbird, but it didn’t want any pictures today, so this picture is from yesterday morning in about the same spot.
Out over the river at the north end, this female belted kingfisher appeared to be preening after a bath.
I heard a few red-eyed vireos this morning, but they must be in the same union as the kingbird, so they also stayed out of sight, and this is another picture from yesterday.
The wood duck drakes are starting to molt out of their fancy breeding plumage, and here are a pair up on a rock in the river and starting to look a little frayed around the edges.
The female ruby-throated hummingbird was still on her nest again this morning. Yay!
Finally, as a pallet cleanser, if you need it, here’s our first American lady butterfly in Estabrook Park for the year.
Okay, time for another bit of news. I’m taking off on a trip again, and it’s just six days, but it is by bicycle, so I won’t be bringing my camera along. Plus, I’ll have to miss another wildlife walk, but I saw that folks logged birds last Monday, the 9th, so I hope that can happen one more time.
Believe me, I realize that two trips back-to-back are a bit suboptimal, but both trips include a slew of people, and these were the dates that worked for everyone’s schedule, so I’m just happy I get to go on both. As before, I’ll post a few pictures to tide you over until I’m back.
We had a nearly-flawless day of travel yesterday, arrived home around 9:30 last evening, and I was able to get back into Estabrook Park early this morning after a pretty good night’s sleep. So, yay! The weather today, on the other hand, was cloudy, cool, and breezy, which isn’t my favorite, and perhaps partially due to Canadian wildfire smoke, but at least it wasn’t raining. So, yay again!
It appears that spring migration has pretty much wrapped up while I was away, and I don’t believe I saw a single bird that still has some more traveling left to do. Luckily, we’re well within the breeding range of yellow warblers, so a few may stick around all summer, and here’s one I found singing by the pond.
I thought I might have missed snapping-turtle-egg-laying-season, but perhaps the cool spring has held things back a bit, because here’s one trying its best to dig into the gravel beside the river at the north end.
The ducklings aren’t the only youngsters growing up, and here are a gaggle of goslings already starting to get their adult plumage in.
I thought I spotted some cliff swallows hunting over the river, along with the northern rough-winged swallows and some tree swallows, so I hiked across the Port Washington Road bridge to check their nests on the south-west side of the Holliday Inn, and sure enough, here’s a swallow appearing to add a dab of mud to one of the nests.
And here’s a second one, at a different nest, appearing to inspect the progress.
Back on our side of the river and on my way south, I found this red squirrel who appeared to be in no hurry to go anywhere.
Finally, when I checked the weeds that grow along the west side of the soccer fields at the south end, I found our first skipper of the year, a Peck’s, as it perched on what appears to be lesser stitchwort (Stellaria graminea) and perhaps tried to soak up what sun it could.
The forecast for tomorrow calls for about more of the same, with maybe a little less breeze, but still no rain, so here’s hoping that I can find as much to show you as I found today.
Nearly as common as the blackcap, which I heard all the way across Europe, and possibly even harder to spot, is the common chiffchaff, but this one yesterday morning finally relented.
Also about as hard to spot as the previous two, but much less seldomly heard, at least by me, was this darling little Eurasian wren.
And that’s a wrap on the little, hard-to-spot birds in shades of brown and grey that I found in Prague. With any luck, I’ll be looking for their North American counterparts tomorrow morning in Estabrook Park.
It was another gorgeous morning in Prague for my last morning out, and this time I was lucky enough to get close to one of the tufted ducks on the Vitava River. You may recall that I saw them often in South Holland, but here is where I saw them first on this trip.
Word must have gotten out that a jay at the top of the hill gave me a hard time yesterday, because today there were at least three jays begging me to take their picture. Actually, it was probably an exasperated parent with some recently fledged youngsters, of course, but I like the first story better.
I was really hoping to catch a blue tit for you this morning, and I did hear a couple, but they otherwise gave me the slip, so here’s a darling little marsh tit, instead, which I first spotted in Ljubljana.
Finally, the Eurasian blackcaps have been plentiful, and here’s one who let me have a picture two days in a row, which is pretty amazing given that I’ve only ever managed to get pictures of them twice before: once in Delft, and once in Shkodër, Albania!
Lastly, this will probably be my last post of this trip, and if things go my way, I’ll be back in Estabrook Park on Friday morning. Wish me luck, and I’ll try to post a place holder to tide you over till then.
We had a nice train ride to Prague yesterday, a great dinner out, and this morning I got up good-and-early to see what critters might be around. I was happy to find that there is a big park on a hill just to the west of downtown, called Petřín Hill, and similar to the one I found in Ljubljana.
I’ve seen a few great spotted woodpeckers this trip, but this one was so busy searching high and low for something to eat that it hardly paid me no never mind, and I could finally get a picture to show you.
I’ve also glimpsed a couple of Eurasian jays, but this one lingered for just the extra second I needed to sneak this picture through the pine needles.
Now it’s time for dinner, and my traveling companions are waiting for me, so I’ve gotta let you go, but before I do, wish me good luck for tomorrow morning, which will be my last outing before we start our long journey home.
Truth be told, I wouldn’t mind being on my way home right now, and while we are technically moving in that direction, we’ve got one more stop to make because it would be a crying shame to come all this way and not stop in to visit the “the historical capital of Bohemia,” which my two buddies from Milwaukee have not yet had to pleasure of seeing. Thus, we’ll be catching the train to Prague in a couple of hours, and I won’t have time to look for more Polish wildlife this morning. As luck would have it, however, I’ve still got a few pictures from Germany and London that I never got to show you, so here we go.
In Germany, we stayed in a nice old inn on the outskirts of town, which was surrounded by forests, and we didn’t yet realize that the fuel line in one of the vehicles had developed a leak, so we thought we had plenty of time and planned on a nice leisurely start to the day.
The nicest surprise for me, however, was getting to see my very first mistle thrush (Turdus viscivorus), hopping around on a big lawn just as the description predicts.
Here’s a red-breasted goose (Branta ruficollis), which “breeds on the high arctic tundra … and winters mainly by the Black Sea,” so a long-distance migrant, and London is not completely out of the realm of possibility.
We had some rain last evening in Kraków, which did a nice job of cooling things off a bit. Even better, the rain and most of the clouds it blew in on had departed by morning, so it was a great time to go out looking for wildlife.
After finding the gates locked at a cemetery and a botanical garden, both reliable wildlife locales in the past, I headed to the river, and found a section I hadn’t visited yet, which was nicely lined with reeds in spots. From those reeds, I could hear great reed warblers singing, so I tried to see if I could get a better picture than I managed yesterday, and as I was creeping towards the water’s edge, look who I found sneaking through the reeds below me. That, Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, is my very first bittern in the whole world, and a little bittern (Botaurus minutus), to be exact. Woo Hoo!
Given how long it has taken for me to finally spot one, none of us should be surprised that it almost immediately bolted, but by then I had my camera out, and I knew what I was looking at, so here’s a nice fuzzy shot of it coming in for a landing on the reeds growing at the far riverbank.
These mallard ducklings, on the other hand, were quiet as ghosts, …
and so was their mom as she kept a watchful eye on the riverbank traffic.
Finally, the bittern was not the only bird new to me today, and here’s my very first Caspian gull (Larus cachinnans), standing on a huge fish floating down the river and from which it was pulling out chunks and gobbling them down. Hurray!
Tomorrow we start to go our separate ways, and three of us will be catching the train to Prague, so keep your fingers crossed that the Czech wildlife proves as accommodating as the Polish has.
It took me a minute to recognize this next face. I thought it might be a young blackbird, at first, but its size and the hint of a white eyebrow tipped me off to the first fieldfare I’ve seen in a while.
As usual, not all the critters here have wings, and here’s a Eurasian red squirrel, who was mixing it up with a couple of jackdaws, and whom we also first saw in Slovenia. (I don’t know why wordpress is rending this image so poorly, compared to the birds before and after it, but if you’d like to see a better copy, just click on it, or this link, to see the original on flickr. Perhaps the issue is the extreme aspect ratio I used to include all of that tail.)
I saw plenty of wood pigeons in South Holland, but this is the first one I saw sitting on a nest. I was tipped off to the location by its mate flying in to deliver a stick.
I could hear three species of tits this morning, long-tailed, blue, and great, but only this great tit would allow a nice picture.
Given that I crossed a wide river to get to that pond, I’m a little surprised that the only waterfowl I saw this morning were a few mallards on the pond, but two of my buddies reported seeing swans with cygnets on the river, so perhaps I’ll find them tomorrow. Wish me luck!
Signs of Life in Estabrook Park 