More Water Birds.

 3-4-21 SHORT HILLS: There’s been some warmer weather and sun, so we’ve been walking. I did a bit of dead fall removal in the yard. 

We visited the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge a couple days ago, it’s only a few miles away, and near the neighborhood where I grew up. There is a raptor center there, but it’s closed now. 

We drove around and stopped at viewing sites. The whole area is flat and wet with standing water, mostly frozen, and still with a lot of snow cover. There were almost no bird activity in the trees. Some of the streams are open and flowing. We stopped at several places where the roads cross the streams. There were water birds at a number of the stops. I got several pix. 

We had a Photography catastrophe after the visit. I thought I had down-loaded the pix to the computer and deleted them from the camera, but I hadn’t down-loaded them. Disaster! We took the camera card to Millburn Camera and they were able to recover those images as well as hundreds of others, mostly pix from the India trip. Elation!

Today we stopped back at Loantaka Park to walk the dogs and check for any new birds. Tonight the winter chill returns.

A pair of Hooded Mergansers sharing a log.

I think she told him a joke.

A different Hooded Merganser male from aanother site.

At another stop we caught these two boys, Wood Ducks, unfortunately they were in the weeds and along way off so the pix aren't good.

One of the boardwalks through the swamp. It's still snow covered after the first few feet--next month.

Today at Loantaka, I caught this Bufflehead duck. He was under water most of the time, would pop-up for a few seconds and then dive again, making it hard to get a pic.

A dozen Mallards dropped in while we were there.

Turkey Vulture fly-by.