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The Yellow-crowned Night Heron has returned to Marine Park, digging for the plentiful fiddler crabs by the shore.
Marine Park Salt Marsh
Brooklyn, New York
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Not 100% sure, but I think it’s a Greater Yellowlegs.
On second thought, I’m going with it’s a Dowitcher.
Marine Park Salt Marsh
Brooklyn, New York
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Our osprey friends who arrived a few months ago at the Marine Park Salt Marsh, are now on the lookout to make sure the two newborns are safe.
Marine Park Salt Marsh
Brooklyn, New York
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Terns are tough for me to identify specifically, so while I’ll guess they’re Common Terns, there are some other possibilities.
But I am eating my heart out that there wasn’t another one nearby so that I could title the post, “Tern, Tern, Tern…”
Marine Park Salt Marsh,
Brooklyn, New York
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Sometimes, from a distance, a Northern Shoveler can look like a Mallard to me. But it’s fun to see the ducks swimming in groups of concentric circles like in the zoomed-in photo above—then I can be pretty sure they’re Shovelers that I’m looking at, as they go round and round sifting the water near the surface for food with their bills.
Prospect Park
Brooklyn, New York
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When the lake freezes over, the birds have to squeeze into a smaller space in the un-iced parts of the lake, but the different species of ducks co-exist surprisingly well considering that they are all after a similar limited food supply of small plants and fish in the constrained area.
In this picture you can see the large Canadian Geese, the male and female Mallards with their wings spread, the small American Coots with their white bills and dark bodies, and lastly, a bunch of Northern Shovelers, standing in the back and floating in the water, dark green head and dark, flat-ended bills, and bodies with white breasts and brown flanks.
It was fascinating to see all these different kinds of birds band together and turn around as one when a few aggressive gulls approached; the gulls were not welcome to this party—perhaps they would not play well with others?—and the ducks soon mobbed the gulls and forced them to go elsewhere.
Prospect Park Lake
Brooklyn, New York
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This jaunty little guy, a Tufted Titmouse, is a kind of bird I usually see hanging out with its cousin, the Black-Capped Chickadee, but this one was foraging all alone. They have a distinct way of flying from a branch down to the ground—they dive bomb straight down headfirst as if they were a gull about to catch a fish, so that even though they’re small, they can be identified from a distance.
Prospect Park
Brooklyn, New York
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This male (the red nape) Downy Woodpecker looks a lot like a miniature version of its larger cousin, the Hairy Woodpecker. They’ve both got very similar markings including a white back, but the Downy is around 6″ compared to the Hairy’s 9″.
One advantage of trying to photograph birds in winter is that you can get a clearer shot without leaves in the way.
Marine Park Salt Marsh
Brooklyn, New York