Of course I had to go down to my favorite place this morning. So with coffee in hand, I was headed out the door by 5:30am. The sprinklers were done sprinkling when I arrived, so I went to see if the cooper's hawks were around. Nope! It was very quiet. I was not surprised as they are old enough to be exploring and expanding their territory.
I walked through the old town museum just in case the hawks were over there. Nope, but did see this say's phoebe....
I headed over to the main gazebo to start my loop and to see the avocets. I heard a very familiar sound and quickly spotted one of the hawks. Cool!
I continued on to look for the avocets but they were not around. I was there for at least two hours and never saw or heard them.....hmmmmm. Hopefully they just moved on to a new home.
All was quiet except for this young black crown night heron in his/her usual spot.
I headed to the back pond. It was filled up but very quiet. Still no swainson's hawk sighting either. I did see a cedar wax wing but was not fast enough to get a pic.
So I made it back to the gazebo. Most of the great blue heron kids have moved on. There were just two left hanging out waiting for breakfast....
I started lap two but just got as far as the BCNH. It felt very quiet, so I decided to double back and head for the cooper's hawk nest area.
On the way I spotted this snowy egret where the avocets usually are.....
I had been seeing the wood duck ducklings all over the main pond. Best I could tell it was the family of eight ducklings I had been seeing all season. I did not see mom or the other family of three ducklings.
Finally spotted one of the sand pipers......
It had been pretty quiet this morning, so I figured I take a chance on seeing if any of the hawks were near their nesting area before I headed home.
Bingo! As I was walking over I could hear one of them calling! Oh yeah! One of them had caught a grackle( small black bird- very common) and was getting ready to eat!
So I'm enjoying the show! The young hawk was plucking the feathers when he dropped his meal......you could almost hear him say "oh shit"
I was standing pretty close to him, so I backed a bit to give him space to recover his food. He dropped down and grabbed his meal. I attempted to get a pic of him flying back up in the tree but he was too fast!
He flew into another tree and continued eating....
And then he dropped it again!
Again he dropped down and grabbed his food. And again I missed the flight shot.....
I tried my hand at getting some video so you could see what I was seeing. I need some work on my videoing skills for sure......
As I was watching my clumsy hawk, I spotted two other siblings . One had some food of their own.
Well that make for a spectacular morning! What I thought was gonna be a quiet, uneventful morning became quite exciting!
Thanks for reading!
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