Magic and Mayhem

Daryl took the kids to run errands this morning and a few minutes later Anna came back in the house to inform me that there was something magical and I had to come! As much as I like putzing online and doing laundry, that sounded even better so off we all went.

We drove a few miles out of town to a nearby set of lakes and pulled over. There is a little pond connected to a larger lake right by the highway and it was teeming with tree swallows. They were swooping down to the water in search of bugs.

Victoria told me “They don’t even care if a noisy child is sitting amongst them!” and told me to come see. I grabbed the baby from his seat and dutifully followed.

Sure enough, these frantic little birds swooped and fluttered all around us with no concern at all about 3 rather yappy humans in their midst. They often came within feet of us, and completely surrounded us.

Some of the swallows were ordinary brown, but about half of them had the most beautiful irridescent blue backs. The bird book says they must be tree swallows, but those have green backs and are not nearly as beautiful as these little guys. Victoria assures me that we probably have not discovered a new species of birds and the color is just off. Of course, they are very small and very fast so they are not good at all at posing for pictures! Still, you can make one out above Victoria’s head in the picture above.

While we were sitting there, a kingfisher noisily arrived and chattered at everybody while swooping over the water. Kingfishers have a machine gun of a song and they are large, pretty and funny looking. It was neat to watch him.

Then, while we were sitting and watching the swallows swooping ever closer, we noticed a bald eagle gracefully soaring above us!

We also saw a huge heron standing by the water when we arrived, who let us come very close before lazily flying off. Later we saw pelicans (yes, we have pelicans in the midwest!), coots and other cool birds.

All total we saw 16 birds, including: red winged blackbirds, coots, cormorants, pelicans, grackles, robins, mourning doves, yellow rumped warblers, tree swallows, rough winged swallows, northern shovelers, gulls, chipping sparrows, a heron, a kingfisher and a bald eagle.

When Daryl announced that he was taking on this bird watching project (100 species spotted by the end of the season) I thought it could be neat for the kids but wasn’t that interested. I have to say that it’s led to some pretty magical moments. It’s amazing what you see if you slow down and look.