The last week has been kind of insane.  I’ve been ridiculously busy and constantly feeling overwhelmed.  And yet… I somehow manage to find time to bird.  And even when I’m not looking for birds, they manage to find me.  

Take, for example, when I got lost and ended up in Orford, NH.  In the process of trying to figure out where the hell I was, I came across, of all things, a Peregrine Falcon:

And while that was a really nice look at a damned fine bird, it was far from the best I’ve had this month.

Sidenote, before I continue– these are all smaller versions of the photos. They are, however, all clickable to larger versions with details (location where photo was taken, details on camera info, etc.)

With Spring comes bugs, and with bugs comes flycatchers.  This Eastern Phoebe is a fairly reliable sign of Spring’s return:

Less reliable, but still nice is the Fox Sparrow.  It’s kind of like a great big, rusty brown, song sparrow.  They’ve been hanging out by our feeders for the past few weeks now:

Mergansers, such as these hooded mergansers, show up in full mating mode:

And, of course, there are swallows.  The trick I’ve learned to photographing swallows is fairly simple: take a whole lot of photos, and get lucky.  In this case, I got very lucky:

And speaking of lucky: dark morning, poor light– I didn’t get this wood duck in time, even though it was very close, but the shot a moment later was actually quite beautiful:        

And, of course, a visit to Parker River Wildlife Refuge, yielded lots of nice birds including Northern Pintails, which we only tend to get in migration:

Not to mention the Summer-long resident Killdeer:

And a bird I much more frequently see in the Northern Climate of Vermont (year-round, not just in Spring) than on coastal Massachusetts, the small and elusive Brown Creeper:

And back in Vermont, there are Ring-necked ducks all over the place right now.        

But the bird that wins the week, that wins the season for me so far, is the tricky to find, difficult to photograph American Bittern.  This bird was hanging out in a bunch of reeds and I just randomly spotted it while driving down the road.  It was so unexpected that I almost thought I’d imagined it.  Indeed, when I went back to photograph it, I thought I had because it took me a few minutes to find it again.  When I first spotted it, it was stalking through the reeds:

But as soon as it noticed me photographing it, it decided to morph into “I’m hiding and you can’t see me” mode:

“See, I’m not here.  I look like a reed.  You can’t see me.”

True story, from a birder friend of mine: he once found a Bittern standing a few feet away from a copse of tall reeds.  It spotted him and immediately just shot upright as in the photos above.  He could, of course, see it because it wasn’t actually in the reeds.  He watched at this bird figured out that it was still exposed, those eyes darting back and forth for a moment.  Then it just sort of sidled its way over.  The way he described it comes across as something you’d see in a cartoon– I could just picture it holding up a sign that says “I’m not here.”  Or maybe it was attempting a jedi mind trick: “This is not the heron you’re looking for.”

So… Spring.  Even when I’m not birding, the birding finds me.