Chincoteague Egrets

This is the last post about our weekend trip to Chincoteague back in November. I enjoyed photographing the egrets too much to not include a post about them. They were not as plentiful as the Great Blue Herons or cormorants. The yellow bill and dark legs distinguish the birds as Great Egrets.

It was a very cold day but evidently the fishing was still good. Most of the birds were standing in water - or at the edge of the water - actively looking for their next meal.

Look at those long toes! The angle of the light shows how fluffed the birds feathers are against the cold.

This one has fluffed feathers too - and that primordial looking kink in the neck that egrets and herons share.

Most of the bits they caught were quite small.

This scene with the mallard and two egrets speaks of communication between species - but what exactly are they communicating?

Right after the encounter one of the egrets flew off into the sunset. And that was the end to our egret observations at Chincoteague.

On the Way to Chincoteague

We made a weekend trek to Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge this past weekend.  There were so many photography opportunities that I will showcase them in several posts over the next few weeks. This post will focus on the trek to get there: leaving home early, crossing Maryland’s Bay Bridge, and making a stop at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge near Cambridge, Maryland.

We started our drive by 7:30 AM - being glad it was a weekend and there would be no rush hour traffic. The morning was quite cold. Many of the leaves in our neighborhood had fallen in the past week but the pines along this road early in our drive seemed to have protected the deciduous trees growing with them. 

The Bay Bridge is less than an hour along our route. I always try to take pictures as we are driving over. There were no closures so traffic on each span was going one way. Note that the bridges are not the same.

When we got to Blackwater - it seemed like it was going to be too cold for anything to be moving. We walked to the end of short boardwalk and nearly gave up.

Then we spotted the Great Blue Heron standing like a statue. Then it started to hunt for a snack. Not that the neck looks a lot thicker in the second picture. He had been successful in his foraging!

There were ducks too. These mallards look fat - or maybe it is just fluffed feathers. I liked the curls of their tail feathers.

At the end of the wildlife drive there were lots of pines and colorful leaves. There seem to be more sweet gum trees than I remembered from previous visits. The brochure for the refuge explained that they are challenged with rising water levels. What was once marsh has become - or is becoming - open water. Some forested area has become too marshy for the trees.

The visitor center has been renovated since we were at the refuge last (in June 2013) and there is a Monarch sculpture in the garden area behind it. My husband commented that it reminded him of the way the butterflies crowd together in Mexico to keep warm!