My owl friends: Prosperous Prospect Park

I've had a busy week but I finally carved out some time to go photographing...yeah!
First I headed down to my favorite spot in Lakewood. It was pretty darn quiet. No wood ducks, black crown night herons or even avocets. Oh well, it was a beautiful morning to be out and about. I was halfway around the lake when I spotted some very cute goslings with their parents.....

And I found a cute family of mallards too.....

I had walked all the way around the lake and took a quick look at the island where the cormorants nest. Wow! There was a pair of great blue herons building their nest! There was not a GBH nest here last year, so I'm excited to see the babies. They're in a good location to get cute baby GBH pics too.
It was fun to watch them today. The male would go get nesting material and fly in to hand it off to the female....very cool!

After enjoying the GBH show, I headed up to Prospect Park. Hopefully the joint would be jumping. I decided to go see how the owls were doing. I met up with a fellow photographer at the owl nest. I had not been over in about two weeks, so in that time they had left the nest area. It only took us about 10 minutes to locate mom and her 3 kids.

After enjoying the owls, we decided to hike over to see if the wood ducks were around. On the way we saw these beautiful western tanagers! We first spotted them across the creek. It was a bit far to get decent pics, so we were gonna walk up to the bridge and cross over to get closer. But thankfully the tanagers flew across the creek and came to us. I just love the colors of these birds!

We walked over to find the wood ducks but they were not around. So we headed back towards the comorant/great blue heron nesting area. As were watching them, a little bird flew up and landed in a bush near me. I glanced up and saw it was a cedar wax wing! It was a pair and they were gathering nesting material. We have an idea where they will be nesting, so stay tuned for cute baby pics!