Luckily, our most recent trip to Theler Wetlands was more productive than our visit the week before. It started when we ran into the Thursday birding group and they were all looking into the river where they. had spotted a Beaver. I knew there was a beaver pond near the southern end of the refuge, but I had never actually seen one here before. Seeing one is actually way more exciting than looking at a photograph of one, but at the very least it’s a reminder that you will never see a live one unless you get out there.
I found it very challenging to get a decent picture because it kept diving and I was fighting the focus on my new lens, but I think I’ve only seen one other beaver in all the years I’ve been enjoy the outdoors.
Luckily, it’s easier to find Crossbills than it is to find Beavers. Leslie spotted a small flock of them not too far from where we saw the beaver. This time I got much better pictures of them then I got the last time I saw them at Theler, though still not quite up to the standards of Photoshop’s AI Search.
I’m really not sure if this is a male or female Crossbill, but I’m guessing it’s a male that hasn’t fully changed colors.
This is definitely a male, as indicated by his bright red colors.
And here’s a female and juvenile Crossbill.
While I was busy trying to get an unobstructed shot of the Crossbills, Leslie was preoccupied with trying to determine what the birds were that were foraging in the brush on the ground.
They blended in extremely well to the dried grass, making it hard for my camera to focus (as noted by the very crisp blades of grass and slightly blurry wing feathers). That’s a good thing because it’s probably just as hard for a predator to spot an immature Golden-Crowned Sparrow as it is for my camera to focus on it.
We were also greeted by our resident Marsh Wren, but it wasn’t up to posing quite as well as it did on our previous visit, so I’ll leave you with this shot of a Northern Flicker
