Awesomeness among the swarms of yellow rumps

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.

prairie warbler

 There was also a black-throated green, another personal favorite.

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!

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.

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.

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.  :-)

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.

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!"

osprey

 We finally made it to the point to see this gorgeous guy.

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!