Swanquarter and Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuges

We headed out to Swanquarter National Wildlife Refuge first thing one morning. The birds that winter there had already left. We tried to walk silently on the decking to get close enough to take good photographs of terns and gulls that are always around.

I watched an osprey dive successfully for a fish but the bird was too far away to get a really good picture.

Our next stop was Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge. This refuge had many groups of coots.

There were egrets fishing in the shallow water. I managed to get a fuzzy picture of one becoming airborne….different enough from the stalking poses I usually capture.

The turtles line up on anything in the sun. This morning was chilly.

I liked this grouping of cormorants. There were some noisy Canadian geese nearby so they did not hold this pose for very long.

The male and female pintail ducks swimming single file was my best sighting at this refuge. I captured these pictures by leaning out of the open car window!

Josey Ranch Lake - February 2015

In my last family visit to Carrollton TX, I discovered that the round trip walk to Josey Ranch Lake was less than 2 miles so I did the walk several times and photographed birds each time. It turns out that during the winter quite a few people feed the birds so there are gatherings of birds near the boardwalk area and at the reed end of the lake where someone always seems to be offering food to the birds (sometimes the nutria too - although I am sure it is not a good idea to encourage an invasive species).

The well-mannered ducks and swans seem to feed with a fair amount of graceful sharing of the bounty. The coots (small black birds on the water with pointed beaks) can get contentious with each other.

If the ring billed gulls show up there are all kinds of acrobatics. They tend catch the food mid-air or just as it hits the water. The coots are the only ones that seem to challenge them! In the incident I saw - the gull always won.

I noted two ducks that I had not seen in the summer and, when I looked them up on allaboutbirds.org they are ducks that winter in Texas…traveling north when it gets warmer in the summer: the lesser scaup

And northern shoveler.

It is a lot easier to identify birds if I manage to take a good picture! My favorite picture from all three times is this last one - the swan with its wings frothed.