The DIA Loop

Yea! I finally had a chance to get out for some photographing! I had seen a few postings about a short earred owl seen on the DIA loop. So today seemed like a good idea to go check it out. The DIA loop was given it's name by the local birders as the roads are near

 DIA( Denver International airport) as you can see.

The short earred owl did not make an appearance but this ferruginous hawk did! Sweet! This was my first sighting of a ferruginous, so as the birders say...this was a "lifer" for me!
A cool fact about these guys- back in the day when the bison roamed the western plains, these hawks made their nests of bison bones and bison wool......

After checking out the DIA loop, I headed over to Barr Lake State Park to see if the eagles wanted their pics taken.....

Got this cute little downy woodpecker looking for breakfast.

And in the next tree over was a brown creeper! I had only seen one at Caribou ranch a few years ago so I was excited to see him/her. They move quite fast similar to a nuthatch, so I was lucky to get these pics.....

After enjoying the brown creeper I decided to walk out to the gazebo which is about 1.5 miles one way. I was hoping to get some eagle pics but they were too far out for a good pic.
I did see a nice group of lesser scaup enjoying the morning...

And there were thousands of geese too!

I had my heart set on getting some eagle pics, so I hiked all the way back past the barn owl nest box( no one was home) to a favorite place of the eagles.
Bingo! One flew by.....

As I got closer to the trees, a couple of eagles flew away but this one stayed to pose for me.

I was shooting into the sun which is not ideal. I needed to get the sun behind me which meant walking under the tree the eagle was in. This could have caused the eagle to take off, so explained to the eagle my intentions. Lucky for me the eagle just hung out while I walked under the tree and got in a good position for more pics!

Here's the eagle giving me the "eagle eye"

Well that was a very fun morning! Now that I know where the DIA loop is, I will stop by there more often to look for the short earred owl!

Thanks for reading!