Saturday, July 22, 2006

Marsh Camp Wrap-up

Well I had an amazing two weeks of camp. I'm sad to see it go, but I am a little happy to have my free time back =) We have been having an incredibly hot summer, hotter than average temperatures made our daily walks a little harder, but we still managed to see a lot of really great birds. Our campers saw 57 species over the course of one week. Highlights included but were certaintly not limited to a barn owl (which I never got to see), a wilson's phalarope, a cattle egret, a flock of white-faced ibis and one of the resident bobcats! The water level in one of the ponds was higher than I've ever seen it, which allowed the campers to get fantastic looks at all our common species of egrets and herons, which were drawn to the large amounts of misquito fish present. It also gave us an eye level view of the terns plunge-diving (Caspian, Least and Forster's) as well as the swallows feeding on the midge flies over the water (Tree, N. Rough-winged, Cliff and Barn)

Probably our male, he has a mate and young =)





Cattle Egret

Flame Skimmer I found with Trude while photographing the bobcat

Wilson's Phalarope in with WESAs

The water level provided unique views of our marsh species...

4 comments:

tai haku said...

great bobcat shots. Getting a decent photo of any wild cat species is a serious achievement especially ones as character filled as these.

Unknown said...

thank you very much, I took an entire memory card full of shots to get these two but it was well worth it! ;)

Amy said...

Ooohh, I'm jealous about the bobcat sighting. I definitely need to spend more time at SJWS.

Unknown said...

yeah it was pretty incredible, and SJWS is awesome in general =)