Geese!

I had a birding tour this morning with a very nice lady from Virginia, Sue Haynes. Usually we have at least 6 or 7 people so this was a nice chance to talk about birds, specifically the research she conducted on Bald Eagles and nesting site selection. Interesting stuff.

Anyway, we saw more than we initially thought, mostly due to the weather. It was cold this morning! But we braved it and were rewarded with the first snow geese of the season. Granted they were a ways off and we had to use the big glass to get a good look at them, but they were lifers for me. Also flying around today were 10 Black-Crown Night herons that flew over us in a loose formation, I've never seen BCNH's act like that before... strange. Elsewhere on our list were: lots of Yellow-Rumps, Flickers, Kingfishers, Tree Swallows and even a Bald Eagle which quickly prompted Sue to digress into that strange biology lilt that researchers are prone to sometimes. I hope she and Gary, her husband, have a good rest of their vacation.

Great as the Snow Geese were, the bird of the day award goes to a more than obliging Cooper's Hawk that zoomed over me as I was giving an introduction to our beach walk tour this afternoon. He nearly clipped me as he skated the dunes and alit on a broken snag eight feet behind my dome. Odd is the feeling being weighed and measured by a Coop's conducting an interpretation skills inventory.

Oh, and on her way down to Hatteras today, Sarah said she saw "huge white birds sitting at Pea Island". I posed a query and she exasperatedly responded "no they're not pelicans Ben, I love pelicans."

I'm leaving to see the swans at 5.