Birding

We love to travel to find new birds and participate in a lot of bird counts. We also created a Guide to Birding Field Guides and host a collection of over 300 birding links from all over the globe.

Conservation

While our main focus continues to be birds, we promote other areas of conservation as well. Conserving land not only benefits wildlife, but is hugely beneficial to people as well.

Outdoors

We love all sorts of outdoor activities, especially hiking and spend a lot of time outside with dogs and horses. We are working to produce more articles on all sorts of outdoor fun!

Photography

Every week we bring you Bird Photography Weekly. We periodically talk about our adventures in digiscoping. Feel free to browse our photo lifelist.

Article in: Birding

Rock Cut Mergansers and Bald Eagle

With the sun brightly shining, temperatures approaching 50, and only a slight breeze, Stacia and I decided to check out the bird activity at Rock Cut State Park. We brought Bella along to hike with us.

Great Blue Heron

Starting out on east side of Pierce Lake we enjoyed a nice show of Great Blue Herons, Hooded and Common Mergansers, Wood Duck, and American Coots. At least one Hooded Merganser was displaying his hood but a Bald Eagle swooped in, stole a fish from a heron, and stole our attention away from the mergansers.

Hooded Mergansers

After feasting on the fish, the eagle flew low over the ducks creating a flurry of panic. However, the eagle calmly headed to a favored perch to digest his meal.

Bald Eagle

We were digiscoping with the Canon 50D DSLR and Swarovski 80mm HD spotting scope with 25-50x wide angle eyepiece. The shot below shows the distance of the tree the Bald Eagle was perched in.

We saw that the eagle was banded but could not quite read the numbers.

After checking the lake we took to the woods where Bella’s retriever instincts kicked in. She flushed a surprised American Woodcock who flew low and disappeared before I could get a photograph.

Bella’s webbed paws in the wet/muddy trail