On Saturday morning my girlfriend and I birded Lake Creek Trail for a couple hours, starting at the Parmer Village model homes. I highly recommend seeing this part of the creek right now because there are dramatic numbers of large wading birds using the creek bed here. They make an exciting sight! The birds are a mixture of summer residents, first-year wandering birds, and southbound migrants. I estimated there were at least 30 Snowy Egrets, 13 Great Egrets, 3 Great Blue Herons, and 3 Tricolored Herons. With them all I was most excited to find a single juvenile White Ibis. It's a new bird for my neighborhood list, bringing my total up to 195 species! The photo above shows 14 of the Snowy Egrets, and the Ibis is with the 4 egrets on the left. Here's another picture I got, showing just the ibis.
Near the last dam this Great Blue Heron and Tricolored Heron were perched up in a dead tree. The Great Blue Heron was panting in an interesting sunning posture I've seen just a few times before.
Today I took a long bike ride around the neighborhood and I couldn't resist taking my binoculars with me. In this same area I was 2 species of native sparrows. One was a Clay-colored Sparrow on its way south, and the other were 2 Savannah Sparrows. This species winters in this exact spot, so these birds might be returning winter residents, or they might just be on their way further south. They were the first Savannah Sparrows I've seen this fall.
1 comment:
Wow, an Ibis? That seems pretty exotic. Never woulda thought you could see that in our backyard.
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