The guides, a husband-and-wife team with a scope, were quite good. We saw a red-tailed hawk, a turkey vulture, many white-throated sparrows, some mallards and black ducks, robins, cardinals (both male and female), a blue jay, and - most thrillingly - cedar waxwings.
Mallards always remind me of Suzie, who loved them.
A single rowan tree, its berries at just the right level of ripeness or fermentation, was alive with cedar waxwings. The guides trained their scope on it, and I went back home to recharge my batteries and get more pictures in the late afternoon. Unfortunately, only the close-ups really came out well; the photos that were intended to give a sense of scale and presence are singularly unimpressive (it's hard to distinguish between dead leaves and live waxwings, as you can easily in person).
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| Who is that masked bird? Only the Waxwing knows! |
Toward the end of the day, I also saw the red-tailed hawk again, much closer, with its back to me and the lowering sun, take off from its perch and fly away in a spectacular flash of red-gold.
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| The seeming yellow drips of wax on the tip of the tail were amazingly vivid through the scope. |
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| The berries are always sweeter on the other end of the branch. |
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| Trying another angle! |
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