All in a Summerlike Day

Common Goldeneye drake from a couple of weeks ago

Yesterday it hit 60 degrees here. It felt like summer...with an undercurrent of chill from the remaining snowbanks and river ice...just an occasional draft of ice air to remind us that the calendar did not agree with the temperature.

 I went out at daybreak (it was decidedly NOT 60 then), dug my summer "office" chair out of the snow, and spent my first official shift sitting in it, watching and listening.

Ring-billed Gull

It was wild and awesome. Throngs of assorted blackbirds hurtled by. Sparrows and finches sang with wild abandon. You could smell dirt! Winter is so sterile in that department. Aside from a now and then passing skunk, nothing smells anything but cold in winter. No flowers. No grass. No funky scent of just plain earth. 

Ring-billed Gull

Yesterday was different.

Better

We birded more than we have dared to in light of recent gas prices. Even with our good mileage little car, staying home has been the better part of birding valor. Thankfully, home gives me a pretty good catalog of birds anyhow, but I miss the river.

In spring...and fall...our Mohawk River is like a candy shop of interesting gulls, shorebirds, and waterfowl in amazing assortment.

Yesterday's highlights were a trio of Iceland Gulls, a Lesser Black-backed Gull, and five Common Goldeneye drakes.

The latter are pretty much what their name suggests, common, with golden eyes, but this set was diving and surfacing every few seconds in a whirl of something in the water, which I imagine must have been a tightly packed school of minnows of some sort. 

Iceland Gull

The swirl was big enough for all five ducks to sit right in the middle of it between dives, and also attracted a male Common Merganser, which swooped in and landed right on top of the COGOs.

The sunset was as fine as the ducks, and evening brought warm winds, that hopefully dried up the runoff river that took out the driveway...again!

Today it is back to normalish, cold, dark, and rainy, but a pair of Mallards flew right over my head, quacking wildly, before the sun was even up. So, who knows what the day might bring......?