The Swans are back!!!

A very interesting day!  Last night my when my husband got home from work he said that he had seen the first swans of the season on Harrison Bay….so I was really hoping to see some here today…

and sure enough, if you look way out there off the end of that emerging gravel bar (notice all the spawning salmon close to shore)…

there they are, the first two Trumpeter Swans for this winter. Of course that is a Mallard in their midst!

out on the flats it was pretty much business as normal….maybe not quite as many eagles as normal…

This 4 year old Bald Eagle was acting very strangely on the top of this piling….he obviously had something, although there is nothing visible in this first picture except some ‘fluff’ on the piling behind the bird….

now he is showing some interest in that pile of ‘fluff’…

then every once and a while he would fly up like this and then land again on the piling….bits of ‘stuff’ would fly off (all those dark specks) and you can see he now has the ‘fluff’ in a talon.  If it was nesting season then a nest would be the logical answer as to what it was.  When I zoom in, it doesn’t look like fur or feathers…I’m just hoping that he hasn’t somehow got caught up in some tangled fishing line.  I can’t see that – but then fishing line is pretty near invisible.

after puzzling over the Bald Eagle for a while, I headed towards home.  There were a lot of ducks out there today.  Obviously there hadn’t been much activity to disturb them today – which is a good thing!  There were a lot of American Wigeon like these guys – male on right and female on left…

Female Common Merganser again – love that hair do!

and more American Wigeon….and then I thought I caught sight of an…

Eurasian Wigeon!  So I just started panning the scene snapping pictures and when I got home and down loaded them…sure enough…there he is!  Only got half of him and it is a poor picture, but he was there.  Hopefully he’ll hang around and I’ll manage a better picture.  This isn’t the first time this Asian version of the species has shown up here at the estuary, but such occurrences don’t happen all that often.