A good birding walk

Sunday
It was a cold morning with a hard frost, but since it was another sunny day I was quite happy. We enjoyed a great service of worship, followed by Bible study, then after a small lunch of leftovers, we headed out to another place we hadn’t been to for a while, Fernald Preserve. It’s usually a good place to see water birds in the winter and today was no exception. My photos aren’t great as they were a bit too far for my lens, but lower left are two Buffleheads, and lower right a Ring-necked duck. The centre bird is a Northern mocking bird seen along the trail. As we reached the end of our walk, the serious “twitchers” were coming in with their huge lenses, to see the short-eared owls which have been seen towards dusk across one of the meadow areas. There’s apparently four of them, and today we got to see two, mainly perched in a tree, but once or twice they took off and swooped low over the meadow. Before our walk we had gone into the visitor centre, which had been closed for a long time since Covid, and the lady on duty had asked us if we’d like to see a movie of wildlife photos taken from trail cameras set around the reserve - a project she had been working on during Covid. One animal I hadn’t expected to see was a family of bobcats, which she had some really good captures of in broad daylight. There were numerous night snippets of a beaver gnawing away at a tree, with the final shot showing the tree falling! There were also foxes, coyotes, raccoons, skunk, and the inevitable deer - some really good footage.