Three Birds

Although birding wasn’t spectacular Sunday and I didn’t see anything new, or even the songbirds that I’d hoped to see, I did manage to get my first duckling picture of ’09, a picture of a Mallard with one of her twelve ducklings:

Mallard with Duckling

I would have had to had a really wide angle lens to get her and all of her ducklings at the same time.

As I noted before, it finally turned sunny when we’d almost finished our walk, just in time to get a picture of this male Goldfinch,

male Goldfinch

a much better shot than I’ve managed to get of the many that have been visiting my feeder recently.

Of course, I also walked out on the pier to watch the swallows, my favorite reason to go to Belfair this time of year. It’s the only place I know where you can almost touch them if you’re patient enough,

Barn Swallow

and if there’s anything I’ve learned from birding the last five years it is patience.

6 thoughts on “Three Birds”

  1. We often get ducks and ducklings going up and down the lane here. Funny how we’re instinctively drawn to the young of just about any species. Trouble is, as the days go by, the ducklings invariably get fewer! Nature red in tooth and claw, as they say.

  2. If you can just sit still for a few minutes, it’s amazing how quickly wildlife adjusts to your presence.

  3. Yes Loren – as Dominic says – our ducklings on the beck diminish by the day – survival of the fittest they call it (or maybe that should be the quickest).

  4. I always thought the goldfinches left me before they put on the brilliant plumage, but this year I saw stragglers on two occasions that were that yellow. Impossible to ignore!

  5. There’s a mother duck I see on my morning walks, with about a dozen ducklings. I’ve gone back with my good camera the past two days, but she hasn’t been out. She has no sense of how to be photogenic!

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