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Ruby-crowned Kinglet
You have to be looking pretty carefully to see a bird this small. It was high up in the treetops, bark-colored, a mere flicker of movement now and then that could just as easily have been dead leaves fluttering. It looked like this.
(That’s on full zoom.) Yet my daughters spotted it.
On the way back to the car, each thought the other had spotted it first. But we all marveled to have seen it at all — a female ruby-crowned kinglet. My husband and I saw some the other day for the first time, but only fleetingly, mostly hidden in the brush. “In that whole forest of trees,” Older Daughter reflected, “how amazing is it that we happened to look in the right spot to see her?”
There’s always an element of grace when you go for a walk — small gifts that open your eyes to something new. Tonight as I fall asleep I’ll be thinking of this tiny fragment of life, busy among the branches, making her long trek northward for the summer. Another instance of a species I could have lived my whole life and never known was there if we hadn’t been looking.
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Palm Warbler
This morning it was 37 degrees and overcast. The very last thing I would have expected was to see a warbler. Second-to-last would be sunshine.
I saw both!
This was probably my most successful photo shoot ever, because I was actually patient. I didn’t get up and move around trying to get closer to the bird. It meant waiting awhile and experiencing some of the other pleasures of being there — birdsong, a pileated woodpecker laughing, ducks. It also meant this little bird was not disturbed and didn’t change its normal activity as a result of my intrusion.
In fact, I’m pretty sure it took a bird-nap at one point. Its tail stopped flicking and it sat still for perhaps five minutes. That’s pretty relaxed!
I didn’t get any good pictures of palm warblers last year, so this is a great start to the spring warbler season.
In a separate jaunt today with my husband and the girls, we saw ruby-crowned and golden-crowned kinglets and a possible red-tail’s nest to monitor. All in all it was a great day!
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Daffodils
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American Kestrel (Female)
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Sapsucker Heron
We saw that the male heron had made an appearance on the nest cam a few days ago, and when we walked around the pond at Sapsucker Woods we figured this was him. He was fishing in an alcove and we were quite close. I got some pics of him with one of the unfortunate fish he caught, but none of them are stellar.It was kind of a man and wife who were watching him to invite the girls and me in to take their spot so that we could see the heron doing his patient, alert work. We passed on the favor to the next walkers who appeared.
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Sapsucker Hawk
We’ve seem this redtail before at Sapsucker Woods. It’s a rehabilitated hawk that was released nearby, and it has adopted the pond and its environs as its territory. It’s somewhat tolerant of people, but as I was photographing it another photographer walked up and spooked it — so it’s still got at least some vestige of its wild “boundaries.”
We saw it several more times during the day. Once as it hunted high in a tree, it decided to move on and simply spread its wings. It was a windy day, and the breeze lifted it like a kite so it was soaring in seconds.
How I’d love to be able to do that.
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Spring Preserve
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Worth a thousand words
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Morning Discoveries
Older Daughter and I took a walk on Saturday morning. It turned into a sunny day in the 50’s, but the day began frostily, especially in the shadier patches of trail.
We stopped to visit the resident raptors at the nature center before starting out, and we found a surprise: a squirrel who’d gotten trapped (temporarily, we hope) in one of the empty rooms.
He disappeared through an interior passageway somehow, and provided he didn’t end up in the hawk cages he probably came out all right. We saw no evidence of tragic demise when we returned on our way home.
It warmed eventually and we enjoyed some beautiful morning vistas.
There were lots of robins about…
…as well as some chickadees. I always think of Blackbeard the pirate when I look into these snappy little eyes.
There were some sobering sights as well. This pile of feathers is all that remains of some kind of ground bird or duck caught unawares.
And a little further on, this lay in the center of the trail.
Of course these are horrible sights and I hesitate to post them. (I did resist photographing the several piles of coyote scat we also saw along this upper meadow where the deer bed down at night.) But anyone who sets out to “discover nature” has to come face to face with them at some point. There is the beautiful, scenic, astonishingly adapted side of nature — and there is the predatory side. When I come upon things like this I can’t help but think of the last moments of whatever animal has become a meal, and of the violence the remains testify to. There are other factors too — the hunger of the predator, satisfied only by cunning and strength and persistence, and these are all part of the picture as well. But I still haven’t found a way to process sights like this easily.
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Park in early spring
We took the dog for a romp at a local park yesterday and saw an enormous raptor of some kind fly over. I’m guessing it was a juvenile eagle — we saw one there back in the icier weather.
Other than that, just a couple of robins for bird sightings. But the sun and the sun-deprived grass now laid bare were welcome sights.
The girls hunted fossils and the dog frolicked. She doesn’t look 13, does she?
