Sometimes it’s just nice to take a break and get away from home, even if just for a morning.  Yesterday’s trip was relatively uneventful, though if we’d taken the time, it might not have been– some fairly unusual birds were at the refuge but we were slacker birders and just having a mellow day.

And honestly, I’m okay with that.  I didn’t get any particularly unusual birds, but I got some fairly incredible shots of ones I’m familiar with.  This Great Egret, for example, didn’t just make it easy.  It actually flew closer to us and started feeding right by the car while we were grabbing lunch.  

After the fold, lots of photos of that same egret, plus a few others.

Our trip was to Parker River Wildlife Refuge on coastal Massachusetts.  It’s one of our favorite birding spots, and it was a very nice day to be birding the refuge.  

This first bird is a semipalmated sandpiper.  These guys are about 6″ long and tend to move about a bit, so I was glad to see one hanging out close to shore:

This is a Snowy Egret and a Great Egret. (The Snowy is the smaller one).  I’m not sure what happened before we showed up, but the short version is that the Great Egret kept following the Snowy– every time the Snowy would move, a few minutes later the Great would come over and hassle it.  My theory is that the Snowy was better at finding food so the Great just kept waiting for it to find something yummy and then would come over and try to steal it.  Ah… capitalism:

Great Blue Herons are just such beautiful birds:

I thought I was photographing the more common Double-Crested Cormorant, but noticing the distinct white patch on this bird’s chin, I’m fairly certain it’s a Great Cormorant.

The feeding egret: I tried to photograph this bird and it flew off.  Then I went back to eating lunch and it decided to try to grab lunch, too, just right by our car.  So I went back and forth between photographing it and eating my lunch.  I love it when they make it easy: