Day 17.302: Birds at Pickering Ponds

We visited the Pickering Ponds trails in Rochester, New Hampshire this afternoon. Our first views of the ponds were completely bird free (apart from a chickadee that announced our presence - unseen from a nearby tree), but in the end we saw and heard quite a few.

Our fist sightings were gulls, which accompanied us for much of the time - first wheeling high overhead and later on the water. Gulls are hard, I suspect we saw great black-backed and ring-billed gulls, but a lot were in first winter plumage and I wouldn't confidently identify any of them.

We did better on the trails away from the ponds:

This black-capped chickadee was eating seeds from these flimsy dead plants, since it couldn't land near the seeds it was hovering at them briefly before finding a safer perch. I didn't see how successful this was, but I watched it do the trick several times.

We had a lovely view of this golden-crowned kinglet after I identified it by sound and then spotted it. It didn't stay still for long, so this was the only in-focus shot I got, but good to see a flash of his golden crown managed to stay in view as he departed.

This downy woodpecker was making a lot of noise pecking on these small branches.

Neither the bird nor the tree seemed sturdy enough to explain the volume.

We also saw a pair of northern cardinals, several American robins, a few American crows and a blue jay and heard a winter wren down low by some water, but couldn't spot it. I confidently said that winter wrens are the same species as the "wrens" we knew from the UK, and so it was understood when we first came to the US, but apparently in 2010, the species were split so they are no longer considered one and the same.

Our last sighting was of a circling juvenile bald eagle. As we looped back to the ponds, suddenly all the gulls on the water took to the air as the eagle approached. For a while he looked quite business-like, but did not attack any of the gulls nor - as far as we saw - anything else. We did get several good views though.

Bottom right is as we first saw it, bottom left is when it was bothering the gulls and the top two were after it seemed to have admitted defeat.