Pleasant weather, warm, no wind, mostly sunny
This ended up being an amazing day. I went to Halcyon lake to begin with just to see if there was anything around. I actually chased around a Northern Flicker for quite some time and got some great shots of it, as well as a couple of rabbits. Apparently Wendy thinks one of the rabbits is a hare, and the other is a rabbit. I’m not sure what that means but she seems convinced. The shots of the rabbit/hares came out pretty good, I’ll post some of them here. Actually I’ll post them on their own page to compare. 
Alright, so after fumbling about with members of the Lepus family I decided to search for the Great-Blue Heron around Willow Pond. So I get there and I’m by the willow with its branches dipping into the water. As I walk to the right of this around the pond by where the workers put in a log for turtles to sun themselves on I noticed…a Great-Crested Cormorant! I think I had seen one here a couple years ago, but this was pretty surprising. I was shocked. Here it is cruising along.
I’m including this picture on the left here only because it looks absolutely horrified. For the record I think it might have been; when it saw me come within twenty feet of it, it scooted off into the pond and continued circling near the middle of it without getting anywhere near shore until I left. I don’t know what brings cormorants this far in land. I guess in the grand scheme of things we’re only about 5 or 6 miles from the ocean so it’s not that far. Still I don’t think of Cormorants as venturing very far from the shore lines that they inhabit. So after watching this bird for a while I decided that it was time to move along and began to walk away. As I did I glanced back towards the log that the cormorant had been sitting on and ended up doing a double-take. There was some sort of baby heron or bittern sitting on the log. I did not have any of my guides with me at the time, ironically this was the first time I had neglected to bring them with me all year. So I settled on it being a least bittern, but that was a complete guess. I got some of the best pictures of it that I have ever gotten with this camera; here’s a couple of them, I’m going to take up the next block of space here with just pictures of this bird, it’s absolutely beautiful.
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| Sad Heron is Sad |
I wanted to include one of the habitat it was hanging out in as well, so there you go. I want to start including more pictures that include the context of where the birds were as opposed to just shots of the bird itself. So it turns out this is NOT a Bittern at all. It’s juvenile Black-Crowned Night Heron. These are not seen at Mount Auburn very often, but if there’s a juvenile here there must be a couple parents around somewhere. Of course I had already written on the bird-sighting chalk-board that I had seen a Bittern, so I had to go back and make a correction the next day. In the meantime though I was taking pictures like crazy when the Great-Blue Heron landed nearby and started fishing. I got some GREAT pictures of it eating a frog, and then flying off to some of the trees and wandering around in the woods. You don’t see Heron’s wandering around in the shade of trees on dry land very often. Of course my memory card craps out and I lose all the pictures of the Great-Blue, but fortunately all the Night-Crowned pictures were safe.
Eventually I decided to leave the water fowl alone and continue walking around the pond, getting a shot of some ducks mucking around in some mud, a clear shot of a chipmunk (harder than it sounds), and a robin stereotypically eating a worm. As I finished my lap around the pond I noticed a frog in the muck and got a good shot of that one too. It was a pretty big frog, I think it might’ve been a bullfrog. Also present, some bizarre looking dragon flies that looked like someone had spray painted white.
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| Muck Duck |
All in all it was a great day, got to see a bunch of diverse life, and my first ever black-crowned night heron!
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