That dreaded season

Yup, here it is. Warbler migration season again! Once again my major inadequacies as a birder are revealed. Another year still has not taught me the eye, the ear or the patience to try to spot fall warblers. They are all too small, too hidden, too similar, too confusing. They hide up the tops of the tree canopies where I can never see them or make them out. My only prayer of seeing them is in going with better birders than I who spot them, and hope they can be pointed out to me. But even when the other person says (quote from a birder I met on a Duval Audubon sponsored bird walk recently) "it's right THERE, just in the tree on the upper left branch in PLAIN SIGHT. It's IMPOSSIBLE TO MISS" I still usually can't even tell which tree or branch they mean, let alone see the bird! Heck I can be standing underneath a single, lone, 15-foot-tall tree and hear TONS of birds twittering in the branches and be incapable of seeing or IDing a single one of them.

Thanks goodness for little fellows like the cheery palm warbler above who will come out in public and show themselves in plain sight. I've seen quite a few palm warblers in the last week or two. :-)

Well, I also saw a black-and-white warbler all by myself - but only because I was with a couple birding friends who were desperately trying to point out the American redstart they were looking at to me. (Note, I eventually did see the American redstart, but who never have seen it on my own).

In the meantime I'm still waiting for my winter ducks! I have seen a couple blue-winged teals lately, one right here in Clay County, a County first for me. I've seen a couple coots also. The eBird bar charts indicate they are both around year-round but I only see them in the winter.

Green Heron

 Earlier this month I returned  from my annual summer trip to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada. I love it up there and I'll have to post about birds seen there later. But by the end of the trip I was eager to get home, to see the family, and once again to sit with my morning coffee, watching my bird feeders and pond.

And my very first morning back I had a visit from a *green heron*. This was amazingly cool. Green herons seem to be a shy and secretive bird, and I see them rarely. If I see one a year that's a good year! And I can never predict when and where I might see them. I have never seen one at my pond before!

So having a visit from a green heron on my first day back was pretty special. Naturally I didn't have my camera handy, but he was perched for a while so I snuck off to get it, hoping he would hang around a bit longer.

And he did, and I managed to snap a few shots. I nearly witnessed a nature tragedy that would really have upset me though. As I watched suddenly one of my local red-shouldered hawks came screaming in for a landing, making a dead set at the green heron! Fortunately the green heron flew off with a squawk and made his escape. I'd have been super upset if my first-ever pond sighting of a green heron ended with him becoming lunch for the hawk.

Meanwhile the hawk landed on the branch vacated by the heron, and sat there for a bit, looking around with a haughty "I meant to do that" sort of look.

These pictures are not very good as I was shooting through a screen, so could not get the precise focus I needed. The green heron came back on and off for several days. In fact one day I even had a *pair* of green herons, my first-ever sighting of more than one at a single time.

But anytime I tried to sneak quietly out of the sunroom to get an unobstructed photo of them they took off as if the red-shouldered hawk was after them again, so I had to be content with these through-the-screen shots.

They haven't been around for a while now, I sure hope they come back.