American Dipper, Eagle, Grouse (20150104) Jamie takes me out for a dipper

While I was in Toronto Jamie had been successful in finding a couple of American Dippers. They can be tough birds to find, and I actually missed then entirely in my second year of blogging. So I was game for a little adventure out to Elbow falls. Jamie was anxious to get back as the day he had been out it was very cold and he was complaining of the fog, On the trip out Jamie spotted  this bald eagle. So we turned around and grabbed a couple images.

We went all the way into the falls and found our first two target birds but the lighting was pretty bad. So we headed out to the second area where Jamie had found birds earlier. On the road out I found this little Ruffed Grouse.

We arrived at the second area and almost immediately spotted a target bird. Soon after we had actually found a second. I really am amazed how these tiny birds are able to survive in  these conditions.

These arequick little flyers and they are hard to capture well in flight but here is an attempt.

With the better light we headed back to the falls where we were hoping to get a little closer to these little water birds. We were rewarded with two separate birds upon our return.

Here is a shot of Jamie shooting a bird on the lower right of the image. You can see the type of environment that these birds live in. The temperature was about -20 Celius (-4F) and we fought the fog all day long.

We both had the pleasure of getting some decent images of these tough little birds as we spent about 3 hours with them.

Two and a half hours after we first found this Ruffed, we left him for the final time of the day. It had moved only about 2 feet to get some additional cover from the spruce bows above it.

The drive home netted us a couple of Moose.

We also found some Whitetails and with the light turning terrible we finished up
trying to grab some images of Mountain and Boreal Chickadees.

Just a terrific day. Quite often we don't find our targetted specie but today was fabulous as we recorded what we believe were six different Dippers. Put some wild in your life, it will do you well!
Turbo