Dreary Morning

Gray sky with rain threatening – and a forecast for heavy rain in the afternoon. Nonetheless, I headed for one of my favorite beaver ponds with the hope of getting a few photographs of wood ducks or hooded mergansers.

On the way my attention was caught by an adult red-tailed hawk in a tree that hung over the road. While most red-tails won’t tolerate a car stopping, this one did –

The pond is a little over a half mile from the road, so off I went along a path through a cut-over woodland and then through a wooded wetland. A bit of movement on the trunk of a small elm tree caught my eye. That bit of movement was a brown creeper hitching its way up the trunk in it’s search for spiders, insects and their eggs and pupae.

The telephoto lens and, later, some post-processing software made some of the images the best I’ve ever gotten of the elusive creeper –

At the pond recently arrived tree swallows were busy exploring cavities in a long-dead tree –

On the far side of the pond two male red-winged blackbirds had taken up positions among the cattails and were engaged in a bit of a vocal duel to defend their territories. The cattail stem on which one was balanced bent under his weight so that, as he displayed, both red epaulets were obvious –

After well over and hour with no waterfowl appearing and the mist increasing it was time to leave. The road I took passes a wooded swamp that was inundated with spring’s high water. A glance revealed a large group of double-crested cormorants, at least 60 birds, both in the water and on fallen trees –

Weather radar showed a storm would soon arrive so home I went. The weather may have been what many would call dreary at best, perhaps even miserable, but to this wildlife photographer it was a really good morning.

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