Greater yellowlegs (20131013) Sunday on the canal

It has been a couple of weeks since I have been out on a walk with our traveling, so I decided to hit it this week as we were doing the recently drained irrigation canal. As we were the last walk of the week and the canal had been drained for a while we didn't grab some of the birds that earlier groups had. The Greenwinged Teals were still around. This shot shows how small they are compared to a mallard.

One of the ladies had brought her grandson, and he had his first chance to feed a Chickadee from his hand.

I grabbed and posted this shot of geese as it is not too often that they fly in an inverted "V".

 I had to include this shot of this Common Merganzer just because of the timing, I love how you can see that the tail actually touches down before anything else.

As we entered into a wooded section of the canal we found some Yellow Rumps and Song Sparrows, we hunted around a single group of trees to try and be certain we found all the birds hiding there.

As we made our way back to our starting spot a grabbed this American Widgeon, there were only acouple of these on the water.

There were alot of Mallards, and when you can grab a shot this clean of one of these green headed beauties, with the bright yellwo bill, you take it.

There were perhaps 40 Greater Yellowlegs running up and down the canal, here is a shot of three of them "resting". 

We found our first Red Breasted Nuthatch as we neared our vehicles.  23 species in total, we missed out on Hooded Merganzers and the odd Northern Shrike that had been spotted earlier in the week. Drop on out to Calgary and we can hook up for a "track".

Turbo