We went out for a walk on Sunday afternoon. It was National Bird Day, but it was very cold and cloudy. There weren’t any birds to be seen.
We walked down the Shiloh Greenway toward Church Street Park. There was a pair of mallard ducks swimming in the pond there. We stopped to watch them for a few minutes, and then started to hear sleet bouncing off of our jackets. Should we turn around and go home, or should we continue to the end of the trail? We decided to continue.
When we reached the end of the trail, we decided to loop around to Town Hall Drive to take a look in the retention ponds. We saw a pair of ducks in one of the ponds. At first, we thought they were hooded mergansers. But then we noticed that one of the ducks had a white belly. I pulled out my camera and zoomed in on the bird. Sure enough, it wasn’t a hooded merganser. It was a bufflehead (Bucephala albeola)! We hadn’t seen this bird before (I had to look up the name when we got back home). I snapped a couple of quick pictures as the sleet was coming down quite heavily. This isn’t the best picture, but you get the idea. I’m hoping the pair of buffleheads will stick around so that I can get a better picture of them!
What a surprise! We took a walk in the sleet and were rewarded with a new bird sighting on National Bird Day.