What a day! The weather was gorgeous, the birds were plentiful. Well, there were plenty of yellow rumps anyway! And a ton of black-and-whites.
In non-bird news, it looked (and sounded) like the fish are spawning. They are ~quite~ splashy!
On the way to meet the group I stopped by the upper lobe bridge and saw a bunch of awesome birds. The group took a brief detour to see the hooded warbler - who did come out to show off, but did not want pictures - and then came back to the bridge.
This prairie warbler peeked out from time to time.
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| prairie warbler |
There was also a black-throated green, another personal favorite.
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| black-throated green warbler |
And a bay-breasted! This is only the second time I've seen one, and the first time was way too brief. Now at least I have some clue what they look like!
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| bay-breasted warbler |
Pressing on, we came to a tree where someone pointed out a kinglet. And it's a good thing they did, because near the kinglet was this gem! I could definitely see this morphing into a superhero costume.
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| Blackburnian warbler |
We briefly saw this scarlet tanager, but it flew after just a glimpse. We did find another one later though, and I think everyone got to see it.
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| scarlet tanager |
I knew this was a vireo, so that's progress. And I knew it wasn't a white-eyed or a red-eyed. It is instead a blue-headed. :-)
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| blue-headed vireo |
What? Oh, no, it's no big deal, just a summer tanager hanging out with a magnolia warbler. The kind of commonplace thing we see all the time. Ho hum.
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| summer tanager, magnolia warbler |
Oh, that? Yeah, an osprey flew over. For a *while*. Like, he really wanted to be seen. "Look up, silly humans! Feast your eyes on this!"
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| osprey |
We finally made it to the point to see this gorgeous guy.
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| Canada warbler |
And then a strange thing happened. The group left and I stayed on for a little while before heading home. And I noticed that there was some sort of shift change in the birds. It seemed like all of the yellow-rumps tagged out, and common yellow-throats tagged in. And the black-and-whites tagged out, and ovenbirds tagged in. Suddenly everywhere I looked was another common yellow-throat or an ovenbird. I saw 4 ovenbirds foraging on the ground together, chill as can be while I watched them. In retrospect I should have taken a picture. However, I was apparently done with that nonsense.
A glorious day!
