February 1, 2010
The Lark in the Morning
The meadowlark at coffeebreak, anyway.
We went up to the Delta Saturday, desperate for a break from the rain and the city. The weather was glorious, sunny with blue sky dotted decorator-style in fluffy little cumuli. Hills green, flats muddy.
We saw:
wild (whistling) swans
lotsa ducks: shovelers, gadwall, green-winged and cinnamon teal, mallards of course, wigeon, pintails, a very out-of-place common merganser in a muddy crappy roadside drainage ditch
geese: mostly white-fronts, good number of snows, and one blue-phase snow in a skein of regular white ones overhead, and huge masses of otherwise-unidentified geese that filled the sky going in all directions as we approached the Wossname Memorial Bridge on the way home
sandhill cranes: good numbers hanging around the Woodbridge Road sanctuary and a massive flyup of them from there, the fields beyond the dikes and beyond those and coming in from all directions overhead and making a tremendous din of bugling that brought tears to my eyes
stilts, avocets, yellowlegses, dowitchers, ISTR a few peep, coots, kingfishers, blackbirds, yellow-rumped warblers, good old robins and white-crowned sparrows and such passerines, and of course meadowlarks
lotsa redtailed hawks, harriers, some kestrels, an accipiter or two, and a prairie falcon who was kind enough to wheel overhead for a minute, showing off her fieldmarks in decent light
a coyote.
Some kind soul has had a portapotty placed at the Woodbridge sanctuary, too, and it was clean and well-maintained. Some equally kind soul had planted paperwhite narcissus just upwind of it, and they were blooming. The Martha Stewart of the Delta!
Posted by Ron Sullivan | No comments yet... 