A Quiet November Day

Sunday morning at the park was another quite and uneventful walk. Most leaves are down already and it's hard to find any colorful ones still attached to anything. I took only 21 photos during my entire walk. The birds I saw included Mallards, a pair of Red-winged Hawks playing high above, Cardinal, Ring-billed Gulls and Dark-eyed Juncos.

The Constantly Changing Evironment of a Public Park

Well the behavior of people still amazes me as much as nature does. It almost never fails; every year I seem to find fallen leaves packed into plastic bags dumped in the park! I just cannot get over the irony of this. Whomever did this put something completely organic and compostable (in a very short time mind you) into plastic bags which will take many many years to decompose! I suppose you could say that they were "assuming" somebody would pick it up for them, but geez, what if they don't? They are quite literally making a conscious decision to pollute the park in my humble opinion!!! I just don't quite understand the thought process here. Well there was hardly anything else of interest to see today and for such a nice day it was eerily quiet. Our "seasonal" migratory birds definitely seem to be gone now, leaving the park to the Woodpeckers for a while. The only bird I did manage to get a shot of was this Dark-eyed Junco on the north side. For me they are another one of those birds that I never tire of as I cannot seem to get that perfect shot that I'm looking for. They are somewhat dull in color from the front but I've learned that they can be quite colorful from the back, showing some interesting blueish and purpleish color mixed in with the slate gray coloring. Somewhere in the last few days, the city (of Brooklyn Park?) decided to dredge out the drainage ditch that runs northeast to southwest and connects with Shingle Creek. The mud and muck that was dug out to make the ditch deeper was piled in gigantic mounds on the inside edge of the ditch, making an awfully ugly sight. Everybody that I know from the park has been looking at this and wondering exactly why it was done. I don't have a definitive answer but I did hear some stories that this is done in response to home owners living around the park who have concerns about water in their basements. I'm not sure if that's completely accurate or not. I think about just how far away the nearest residential home is to this area and it's quite a ways.

Last Visit for October 2012

It was a bit of a greyish fall day today and the park was pretty quiet. One of the first things I took a photo of was a car parked in the south parking lot that seemed a bit suspicious. It seemed like maybe they were dumping garbage out as they were parked in the very end spot near the woods while there were no other cars in the lot –and I noticed some freshly dumped garbage very near there. I hung around a bit hoping to catch them in the act but never did. Instead I blatantly stood behind their car and took photos of their license plate hoping to scare them off but they never did move. After I moved on I saw only a handful of birds including a Downy Woodpecker, White-throated Sparrow, Goldfinch, Chickadee and Dark-eyed Junco. The Golfinches have now lost their brilliant yellow plumage from summertime, really hitting home that there's not too much left of this fall season.

Cold Saturday and First Shrike

Today was my first visit to the park recently where the water was actually iced over -not totally frozen but just a thin layer. It was only 30º this morning and we had our very first snow flurries in the air just this last Thursday, October 25th so it seems that winter is just around the corner. Maybe I'll actually get to use my snowshoes this year! I first noticed Dark-eyed Juncos have come back to our area nearly a month ago, but this morning they made up about every other bird I spotted. I'm always trying for a better photo of one because they tend to flit about quickly and don't let you get very close. This one landed near me for just a split second before moving again. Another bird I don't have many photos of is an American Tree Sparrow. I saw quite a few of them today as their rusty colored cap was very noticeable in the bright sun. If you are able to see them closely enough you'll notice that their upper bill is dark while their lower bill is yellow. People also go by the dark "spot" visible on the breast but I think sometimes this can be kind of tough to see as it's not always that dark or defined. Before I was even half way around the park I ran into a friend (and quite talented birder) who told me that he'd seen a Northern Shrike today -and even as early as 2 weeks ago. I had just been thinking to myself that with as cold as it's been, and how often I'd seen Shrikes last year that they should be coming back any time now. Well as luck would have it, I too spotted one a bit later on the north end of the park. It was perched in the tall dead tree right alongside the straight part of the paved path and I would have missed it had I not been watching more Juncos again. It almost seemed like it was watching the smaller birds below it and I was wondering if I might be lucky enough to see it go after one of them but no luck there. I'm sure I'll be seeing a lot more of the Shrikes this winter season but I was fairly surprised to know they are back so early. Among lots of other more common birds I spotted today, I also caught a few good glimpses of Yellow-rumped Warblers who are still apparently passing through on migration. All of the Yellow-rumps I've seen this fall have been this brown color with dull yellow shoulders -not the darker blue that you'll see in the springtime. I'd assumed they were all females but I'm wondering now if maybe some are males. Someone recently described the plumage to me as "transitional" so I'm wondering if some could be immature males. Either way, it was neat to realize that I spotted a Warbler and a Shrike on the same date.