Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge

I’ve posted already about the vultures and egrets at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge and the sunset/sunrise at the Assateague Island National Seashore. This post is a collection of other aspects of the place that I photographed on our visit in May.

There were ducklings that suddenly appeared from behind a clump of grass with the momma and proceeded to bathe in the water. Some of the ripples in the picture above are actually more ducklings that have temporarily submerged! Hours later it occurred to me that it would have been an excellent time to try testing out the video function in my camera.

There is a new visitor center at the refuge. The skylights are on top of chimney like structures. They provide light to the inside but not direct sunlight. Good design.

Does everyone that goes to the beach take at least one bird picture like this one to the left?

We didn’t seen any of the famous Chincoteague ponies in the refuge but there were two mares with colts in the corral next to our inn that were available for adoption. These ponies did not seem as scruffy as I remembered from previous visits when we had seen them in the marsh.

The light house was being renovated but we walked around to see it through the trees. I managed to use the zoom to take a close up of the top with the cables attached to support the renovation work.

On the way back to the car from the lighthouse - trying to walk faster than the mosquitoes and midges - I managed to notice and photograph a frog beside the path. It seems like 9:00 AM was the wake up time for the insects and nothing deterred them!

Egrets at Chincoteague

In the early morning, egrets gathered in the shallows at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge. The gathering was quite close to a place we could park and we were thrilled that they ignored the noise we made getting out of the car. There were two different kinds. The Great White Egrets are the ones that look calm and sedate in the picture above. They are larger and have yellow beaks. Do you see the two of them in the image?

The other birds are snowy egrets. They have black beaks and yellow or red near the eye. The red is the breeding coloration. They were anything but sedate. The squabbles went on and one with lots of fluffed feathers and then some calming seconds to find a snack or strike a pose. Their feathers often look punkish during breeding season.

The Great White Egrets were more focused on food. They generally ignored the Snowy Egret ruckus but sometimes would be forced to move out of the way. My husband caught two sequences (back and front) of the birds landing after a short flight. The pictures show the wings turning up at the end and the way the wings fold as they are landing - with one last flap before finally settling.

Blue Grosbeak at Chincoteague

We pulled into a parking area in Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge beside the road to look down into the water where the egrets had congregated earlier in the morning. There were a few left that we had spotted. Then we notice a splash of color in the grass. I had the advantage - being in the passenger seat with my camera already in my hand. I rolled down the window and started taking pictures. The door helped steady by hold on the camera as I increased the magnification. After the two birds flew a short distance further way, I was able to get out of the car and follow for a few more minutes of picture taking.

As I took pictures, I thought the birds were indigo buntings. There had been pictures in the Refuge’s visitor center that I remembered from the previous day. An hour later when we were in back in the visitor center, I was not so sure. The blue grosbeak looked pretty similar. I could not be sure on the small screen of the camera and I had not looked at the birds with the binoculars; the beak would have been the key indicator if I suspected the issue while the bird was within sight.

When I got home, I used the All About Birds site while looking at the pictures on a larger screen. Confirmed - it was a blue grosbeak pair! And they were a lot prettier than the vultures I posted about previously.

Ten Days of Little Celebrations - May 2013

Back in August 2012, I posted about finding something to celebrate each day. It’s an easy thing for me to do and the habit of writing it down reminds me to be grateful for these and a myriad of other things in my life. Here are some ‘little celebrations’ I’ve noted this month:

Peonies at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden. The whole garden was special but the peonies were the highlight. See the post here.

Rhododendron at the Norfolk Botanical Garden. Lots of beautiful plants and glass artwork…but the rhododendron were at their best. See the post here.

A balanced diet day that met 90% nutritional requirements from food. I started recording me food intake on cronometer.com and learned very quickly that there was room for improvement. First I got the protein/carbs/fat percentages aligned to the recommendation (when I started, fat was overwhelming carbs too frequently); then I started to improve the percentage of nutritional targets I achieved with food (from the low 80s to low 90s). It has be more of a learning experience than I anticipated - and a very positive one.

New camera. I am thoroughly enjoying my new camera (a Canon PowerShot SX280 HS). See some blog posts about it here and here.

Planting seedlings grown in egg shells. I planted some seedlings started in egg shells that are doing well in pots on the deck. See the gleanings post that gave me the idea.

Lowest weight of the year; highest stock market day of the year. These may seem like unrelated metrics but they are both items I monitor daily. It is a day to celebrate when they both move in the right direction on the same day.

Horseshoe crabs at Sandy Point State Park. The view of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge would have been the highlight for me if the day had not been so misty. Instead I flipped over a horseshoe crab that had stranded itself upside down on the beach and celebrated that is crawled back into the water. I’ll be doing a post about the park in a few days.

Osprey, barn swallows, and immature bald eagle at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. I cannot pick which of the three birds I enjoyed spotting more! I’ll have a blog post in a few days.

Blue grosbeak and egrets at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge. The surprise of seeing a purple grosbeak in the wild for the first time was quite a high point…but then the myriad egrets and their antics took the stage. Pictures will be posted in a few days.

Finding a surprise iris in my garden. I thought I had moved all the iris bulbs from the back garden that had gotten too shady to the front garden where they would get more sun. It worked - they are booming in profusely in their new flower bed but I found on lone flower in the back flower bed….a missed bulb that managed to bloom even in the shade. I celebrated its survival.

Vultures at Chincoteague

As I walked back to the parking area near the Marsh Trail at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, I noticed a vulture near the top of a dead tree. Pretty soon another bird joined the first. I decided to experiment with the zoom on my new camera. The results are in this post.

Vultures are probably the least beautiful of birds. The head is naked of feathers and their eyes look watery. The mouth is large. They hold themselves in a way that always has a somewhat sinister aspect - hunched, holding their wings in a way that appears to hide something in front of them, spreading their wings to dominate with their size. The two in the tree interacted very little but both spread their wings after a time - I assume to enjoy the warming sunlight on their wings. Many years ago, canoeing on the Guadalupe River in Texas after a night of rain, we saw a tree full of vultures with their wings spread in the sun. I think it was the first time I realized how big the birds are.

I try to convince myself that these birds fill a useful niche in the environment - cleaning up carrion more quickly than insects, mold, and bacteria can do the job. Still - they are not a bird I want around my neighborhood!