Late Summer Day

A gorgeous late summer day! Sunny, clear, no bugs, with the first hint of fall in the air.

                                                                                            Sumac in front of cornfield




                                                                      Cedar Waxwing balancing on a branch to pick berries

                                                                                                       Ripening berries

                                                                                                        Reflections on a stream


So far this year I have seen only two Monarch butterflies! I tried to take a photo but it wouldn't hold still until it settled briefly on some gravel on the path.



                                                                      A young Great Blue Heron hiding in the reeds:



We are off tomorrow on a road trip to Michigan - Grand Rapids and South Haven - for a family get-together - not much opportunity for birding, I am afraid, but I am looking forward to seeing family and friends.

Belted Kingfishers, Green Herons, American Crows and Poison Ivy

Saturday morning: after a brief stop at the Chatham Lighthouse, still in a predawn fog, I drove to the Mass Audubon Wellfleet Sanctuary. The sun was just coming up over the distant dunes across the bay:



From a birding blind I got some nice photos of a female Belted Kingfisher:





and a couple of Green Herons:







On the tidal flats Semipalmated Sandpipers were busily running back and forth gleaning the ground for tidbits



and the air was full of noise from the many scavenging American Crows.



I left the sanctuary at about 10 AM and headed out on to Rte 6, planning to stop at another beach or so, but when I saw the free-flowing traffic heading off the Cape I joined the exodus, thinking to avoid massive traffic jams later on. There had not yet been any signs of the coming storm, but as soon as I hit the mainland, the sky opened and rain was coming down by the bucketful.

During my visit I had been very careful to keep to the paths avoiding the poison ivy that was growing in lush profusion everywhere inland. Cape Cod appears to be the original home of the Poison Ivy, a shiny shapely three-leaved plant of the greenest of green. Actually quite beautiful.

Cape Cod - Roseate Terns

Continuing my post from this morning, I made it to Race Point Beach at the very tip of the Cape by afternoon. It was hot, the sand so hot that you couldn't walk barefoot on it; even hot for this Greater Black-backed Gull who was cooling off by keeping its beak open:


Whereas Brattleboro was under a cloud of thunderstorms, here at the beach people were having a good time.


Small flocks of terns were flying parallel to the shore, so fast, and hard to catch a decent photo - in fact I had to discard about 90% of my photos. On closer inspection at home I verfied that most of them were Common Terns,(See correction below. On this photo only the bird on the lower right is a Common Tern; the others are Roseates}




But there were a couple of Roseate Terns - juveniles:



At Race Point I also bought a map and the Mass Audubon publication "Birding Cape Cod" to help me plan for Saturday. Exhausted and exhilarated I drove to Hyannis where I had made a reservation at a motel, and after a supper of a box of graham crackers brought from home and two ice-cold Pepsis out of the machine, I fell into bed to get up at 4 AM the following morning.

8/30/09 Correction: After checking with some experts it turns out that most of the terns that I saw were adult and juvenile Roseates: