Click any of the images for a slide show of larger versions.
It was by far the best day of the year, so far, even if it was tax day. The temperature was in the 70s and the sun was shining brightly and we’d been hunched over our computers most of the day, so we decided to walk around to the duck pond to see if there were any baby ducks to be seen. This is as close as we came to any babies of any sort and as you can see this is a goose! But just before we found this goose, we’d been distracted by an urgent squawking from the sky. Looking up, we saw what Pam thinks is a young osprey.
And, it could be. It was performing a maneuver reminiscent of that which an osprey does when it’s hovering over water about to pounce on a fish. But this bird was high in the sky. I thought at first that it was attacking a smaller bird, but there was not one to be seen.
I snapped off a series of shots from which I’ve created the composite below which I hope gives an idea of the maneuver it was performing.
The second and third images show the bird practically hovering. All the time it was making a high-pitched squeaking noise. Pam thought that perhaps it was lost and was calling for its family.
We walked on to where the duckpond passes under the bridge at Wickapecko Drive and walked down to the water’s edge where a pair of ducks were happily splashing about in the water.
Suddenly, Pam noticed this wonderful bird in a tree across the water. Out first heron of the season, and the first time I’ve seen a night heron in reasonable light — my previous encounters in 2001 had been later in the evening in the gloom.
That red eye is not an artifact of my camera’s flash. The bird has red eyes. I moved up the bank some to get a better angle and this attracted its attention so it turned to look at me. At that point, a young starling in the tree above us started making an incredible noise as it struggled with the concept of being out of its nest and this seemed to spook the heron.
It started up the branch and quickly flew away downstream. The question is, was this its new home and we’ll be able to visit it over and over, or was it also just visiting this corner of the duck pond and it actually lives elsewhere? Only time will tell, but at least I got these super pictures.