Four locations on Saturday Afternoon

I set out first to stop by the Fireman's Pond to check on the wood duck and her brood of five wood ducklings, but there across the street in a rather bedraggled looking tree was this song sparrow.



I saw the duck at the other end of the pond from where I'd parked. As I made my way over, I disturbed a green heron. This was the first one I've seen this year. I took this shot just in case it didn't hang around.



The wood duck had moved her family out of the water and I'm pleased to report that all five of them were there, although you can only see two of them in this picture.



Rather than moving on, the green heron focused on feeding itself, moving out into the water and thus into a better view for me:



It either swallowed its catch very quickly or came up empty!



And then the heron took to the skies.



So I made my way over to Shark River Hills. It was high tide so there weren't many shorebirds to be seen (other than a large number of swans that I chose not to photograph). I was at first fooled by this bird. It looks so like a sparrow of some kind that I was searching through that section of Sibley's until is suddenly hit me that this was obviously a female red winged blackbird.



This should have been more obvious to me given how many red wing blackbirds there were there. I didn't get a really good shot of any of them, but these two aren't bad.



This one would have been great had it not been for that piece of vegetation obscuring the tail.



Now here's why I want a longer lens. I didn't even realize there was a bird in this picture until I saw it on the computer. That's a juvenile bald eagle sitting beside the nest.



Here's another picture that would have benefited from a longer lens. I'd been watching the osprey on the left for quite a while hoping it would do something interesting (like fly towards me) when the second bird suddenly showed up.



I made my way over to the environmental center and discovered they've cut a new path through the woods that allowed me to get this close-up shot of an osprey's nest.



These last three images were taken from inside the center through a not particularly clean window. When I'm shooting through glass, I try to get my camera as close to the glass as possible to get it as far out of focus as possible so it has a minimal impact on the image.