My owl friends: A Mellow Day- Mostly

My camera was calling my name, so I was up and out the door just as the sun was coming up. I decided to head down to my favorite spot in Lakewood. I'd had a busy week, so this was the perfect place to go. It's easy to walk the loop and if and when I got tired, the car was not far away.

Right away I could sense it was gonna be a mellow day. The seasons are beginning to shift from summer to fall. So that means some birds have already left, others are packing their bags and the birds that winter here have not yet arrrived.
The usual wildlife was around, so they got their pics taken today.

First up was this bunny. He sure is cute!

I could see about 5-6 snowy egrets around. This one posed nicely for me.....

And I had to go for the reflection shot too.

It was pretty quiet as I walked around the main lake, so I enjoyed the coolness of the early morning. A few deep breaths of the cool moist air felt so good!

I had almost gone around the entire lake before spotting one of my black crown night heron friends. He fluffed up his feathers and settled in for a nap.

This female mallard was also enjoying the day. Still no sign of the male mallards. As you may recall I mentioned how most male ducks lose their flight feathers for a few weeks and go into hiding. They should return soon and hopefully the male wood ducks too. I always love seeing the handsome wood ducks!

Not far from the mallard was a female wood duck.....
Yup! I love those reflection shots!

I decided to head back to the parking lot and head up to Prospect park on my way home.
But all of sudden there was quite a bit of commotion. All the swallows were squawking away and I soon found out why. A cooper's hawk had shown up and the swallows were not happy!
They were dive bombing him quite a bit which is why he's looking up in the first pic......

He felt like a young guy, so the swallows made him nervous. He flew to a few different trees but they continued to harass him. So he finally flew across the lake to escape them....

Well, the cooper's hawk brought some excitement to the mellow morning, so I headed up to Prospect Park to see what was going on......

Again I could tell it was kind of quiet but I headed off to see who wanted their pic taken.

I got to the bridge and spotted one of the rock squirrels. I had seen these guys a few months ago as youngsters. So this guy had grown quite a bit. If you look closely you can see there is some dust and maybe spider webs on the squirrel's head.....

I looked for the cat bird but no luck. I did see a few gold finches fly by and also a couple of hummingbirds. Oh well, I continued on and look who I spotted......yup! One of the great horned owl parents. He looks like the dad to me. He was pretty far from the nest area. At least a 1/2 mile west of the old nest. I wonder if he was coaxing the youngsters to head this way or he just needed a break from the kids.

I headed over to the old nest area to see if any the young owls were around but no one was there.

I did see this cute squirrel was enjoying some yummy apples!