and now it is May

The month of May started out very promising with the sunniest, warmest day we’ve had yet this year…

this picture was taken May 1st…

same view today – in the rain – the most important thing to notice is the level of the rising water.  The only birds visible over here were this pair of

Mallard – sneaking along the far side of the bay…

here we were looking sort of southeastwards yesterday…

and eastwards today – the gravel bars are disappearing – as they should be this time of the year.

most noticeable when we set out today was a lot of Canada Goose ‘carry on’ – went to the viewing platform and there was a Goose perched on the nearest piling, with another at it’s base and another perched on a piling further down…

here is the one perched on the closest piling – the one with all the purple martin boxes on it.

Just as I reached a point where I hoped to be able to see a bit more, the one from the other piling flew over to this one, there was a bit of a ‘kafuffle’ and they disappeared from sight.

The vocal carry on continued, so on the way back we returned to the viewing platform to see what we could see….

 

 

in the short length of time we’d been away there had been a migration ‘Fall out’….all the bushes in the surrounding area were covered in birds….primarily Yellow Rump Warblers….

This one, and the one above being male ‘Audubon’ Yellow Rump Warblers…

but also some of the ‘Myrtle’ sub species – these having white ‘chin’s rather than yellow.

It wasn’t just Warbler’s though….here a couple of Warblers, but also a couple of American Robins…

but also White Crowned Sparrows (we have had some White Crowned Sparrows here for a while as some will stay and nest here, but many more will move through)

also seen was a Lincoln Sparrow – the picture I took today was only good enough for me to be able to give it a positive ID so I am using this ‘file photo’ taken in my former backyard several years ago.

If the weather hadn’t been so bad, I would have gone back with binoculars to see what else might be in the mixed flock…but since it continues to be wet, windy, and miserable I haven’t bothered.

The Canadian Geese had now proved to be 2 pairs…this pair had settled into grazing on the grass on the gravel bar across from the log bay and a second pair were at the point of this same gravel bar.

One more note:  there was a pair of Osprey flying about earlier today.  Yesterday we spotted an Osprey nest being build on a piling just to the north of the bridge that takes highway 7 over the Harrison River.  I’ll attempt to get a picture of it one of these days.  Osprey have always nested on pilings out on the river, but this is the first pair to do it in a spot where a boat isn’t needed to view it.