More promising…..

Today was a more promising day on a number of levels…

for one thing, the water levels dropped quite dramatically over night so there was a lot more area for the Bald Eagles to feed on today and yes, that white stuff along the edges is ice…it dropped to several degrees below freezing but was still quite windy, resulting in the icy build up…

of course all was not perfect, the photographers might have been gone from the flats but if you enlarge the above and look closely you will see some of the hundreds of ducks taking flight….why? because 2 fishermen had parked on Morris Valley Road and were proceeding to walk out across the grasslands to the flats and presumably to the river beyond.  There were a number of people fishing from shore on this side too but that didn’t seem to cause any disturbance.

speaking of ducks, there was a real assortment out there in the area near our boat launch….notice the Northern Pintail in the back – the first one I’ve seen this fall….that is a female Hooded Merganser in front.

there is a real assortment in this picture…Mallard, American Wigeon, Common Merganser, Hooded Merganser

and the little flock of Buffleheads were there today as well.  Fortunately the fishermen who walked out were courteous enough to stay well away from this area so the birds here were undisturbed.

I don’t normally go for walks in the afternoon on weekends because I hate seeing all the human activity that takes place, like the above jet boat stuck on a sand bar….but today I’m glad I did because I ran into David Hancock (Eagle biologist) who was in the area with a film crew.  The Hancock foundation has live streaming cameras out on the flats and are now astonished and very upset with the amount of human disturbance that is taking place out there. 

When I got over to the area of the log bay, there were approximately 30 Swans out there and from the calls, most, if not all were Tundra Swan

Here is a bit closer look at some of them, and notice there is one lone Canada Goose with them!…in fact from the head shape I’m almost thinking it is a Cackling Goose, but since I didn’t get a look at the whole bird to see size, I can’t be sure.

I’ve super cropped this picture to show the amount of yellow on the bill of this individual Tundra Swan.

this was kind of cute….this tiny little strip of emerging gravel bar was lined end to end with gulls…happy to have somewhere to sit!

Oh, and one last note…the path to the park has been cleared out again so with the water levels dropping we can now go for our normal walk.