Saturday, April 18, 2009

First foray to the Gardens, 2009



It being sunny and in the 60s yesterday -- the first real day of spring we've had -- the Lady Friend and I set out with our Pentaxes to the Chicago Botanic Garden in nearby Glencoe. While the L.F. sought blooms, I hunted birds. They were in short supply, except for a few yammering grackles and a solitary couple of mallards on the big pond, and I took dozens of shots of them. A bit later, as we investigated Spider Island in the interior of the gardens, a pair of colorful red-breasted mergansers appeared on the inlet, plunging for fish. The diving-duck species we see every day at the Writer's Lair on Lake Superior is the less colorful common merganser, and this was the first sighting of the red-breasted variety for me. Their red eyes are weird. Another check mark for my bird book and another keeper of a photo. Yay! (Click on the photo for a much larger, detailed version.)

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