Mink, Beaver, Muskrat (20141229) A successful return to the "Spit"

Well, I lost Neil as a traveling companion on my return to the "Spit" so my brother-in-law, Andy-who introduced me to the park last year, was an adequate stand in. Our first "find" of the day was this litle Muskrat.

It was great to see that the Long-Tailed's were still in the area feeding.

As it turns out, while I was shooting the LTD's a mink had slipped behind me and went up the pathway.  I grabbed this Mallard portrait at the same sitting. I like that I was able to capture both the green and the blue hues in his head.

Another visitor in this area was this Beaver, we actually found two of these large rodents on the day.

I didn't get alot of chances to shoot the LTD's in flight, so I am pretty happy with this effort. I really like the colour of their toes versus their webs. I really wish that we would have had some real light, these shots could have been so much better.

We met a lady on the walking bridge that mentioned that she had seen several Mink around the lighthouse, so Andy and I resumed our journey.  At a separate pond we found another set of four very friendly swans. These were a small group with J15 as the only tagged bird. 

This was also a very busy little pond as there was a beaver here building a lodge on the shore line. Then my wing man spotted this little beaty working the shoreline ahead of us. We closed in and I managed to grab a couple of images for the first Mink to make the blog. This makes the 4th weasel specie I have been able to find so far this year. 

It has been my custom that when I get a new submission to the blog lately to include a couple of images minimum in the post. Thankfully for this post I will be able to include images of a second Mink.

While shooting this little fella, we were joined by Simon and Jill of Ghost Bear Photography. You can see their work here.  There were out looking for Snowy owls, so I told them that they had to come to Calgary. Simon admitted to having seen the blog here and was quite complimentary. If you are Facebook you can look up their accounting of the day on December 29th! Apparently they had been looking for a Mink about as long as I have :)

I finish this post off here with a second look at our second little weasel of the day. 

A highly successful day! Get out and put a little wild in your life, no telling who you might run into out there in the woods. You might even bump into me:)

Turbo