Grebes!

I have recently (as in about 15 min. ago) learned the art of zooming and cropping in my free photo editing software and therefore seem to be able to upload pictures in a timely manner again. Yay!

I went down to Montrose Harbor today to see the Grebes that I had heard about on the IL Birders Forum and I was not disappointed. I spent forever taking pictures of them, and forever whittling down which ones to upload, but I'm proud to say that I didn't have to download ANY pictures this time off the web to show you what any of the birds look like. These are all my own pictures!

So here we have a male Horned Grebe. I have a picture later which better illustrates why they're called horned. Isn't he pretty? They have a red eye (this is their breeding plumage, non-breeding is grey and white), white tip on their bill, and of course the gold behind the eyes.

Here is what I suspect is a juvenile male. He's too pale to be a breeding male (or maybe he's just not all the way into his breeding plumage) and it took me a long time to try and figure out what was going on with this guy. If you blow up the picture, you'll also note he looks kind of scruffy, which would indicate that he's molting, so it may not be a juvenile, just a male still getting into breeding plumage. This is by far my favorite picture of the bunch! So cool! These guys must be awesome fishers because I saw at least 3 chowing down on fish just while I was watching.

Here's a female Horned Grebe. She has a little of the gold color on her head and neck, but she's mostly gray and white with a red eye.

I was shooting into the sun for this one so it's a little dark, but you can see how the gold feathers on his head stick up a little bit and look like horns.


There were a whole bunch of Red-breasted Mergansers way out on the water, but the only reason I posted this picture, was so I could post the next one.

Action shot!

Actually, I have at least 4 pictures of empty or splashing water where I took the picture just as the ducks went underwater, so I was terribly proud that I got this one in action.

Here is an American Coot. I posted on them last fall and went into some detail about their feet and how they're actually Rails, not ducks. Well, you can see his weird, big toes in this shot. For some reason I couldn't get a great shot of him, although I have a good one of him swimming away from me.

At the end of the day I went over to a little pond on the golf course because I thought I saw a Coot on the pond. Then I thought it was a Ring-necked duck (which I saw a few weeks ago but haven't posted on yet), then I finally realized that it was a female Scaup. The white on the face threw me off.

I also hung around the hedge a bit and got this really good shot of a Fox Sparrow. They spend a lot of time on the ground, so I was lucky to get this shot of him up in the tree before he flew away.

Oh, and I harassed a poor squirrel. It's just so much easier to take pictures of squirrels than birds. They can't fly.
That's all for now. I'll try and post more pictures later :)