Nature Is Not Always Pleasant

Our trip through Ding this morning, to check on the nests, left me feeling a bit unsettled. The nest with the four Yellow-Crowned Night Heron chicks still had four chicks, but one of them didn’t look as if it would make it much longer. For whatever reason, one is much smaller than the other three. Maybe it hatched a couple of days after the others, so they had already started to thrive and were stronger? We watched as the three larger chicks pecked and pulled at the little one. They had pulled out most of its feathers and were trying to push it out of the nest. It was sad to watch nature’s survival of the fittest playing out in front of us. These four photos are the least upsetting of the ones I took.

On a happier note, the Anhinga below is one of the two chicks I have been posting about since they hatched around the first of May. I wasn’t sure she was one of them at first. But, she was acting very clumsy and uncoordinated as she sort of hopped from one branch to another. She also watched every sound and movement with watchful eyes.

When she hopped to another branch and turned around, her feet were the give-away for me.

Below is what an adult Anhinga’s feet look like . . . very different.

Anhinga_Feet.jpg

The Tri-colored Heron is still sitting on eggs in the nest. Hopefully, there will be chicks next time we go by.

We saw the young Green Heron below. It looks very much like the one we saw last week and in almost the same spot.

The two birds below were at quite a distance, but it’s not every day that you can get a photo of a Swallow-Tailed Kite with a wingspan of around 4 feet and a Frigatebird with a wingspan of 7 to 8 feet in the same picture.

The Common Gallinule below wandered by the boardwalk.

The nest below is pretty far downstream from the boardwalk and I could barely see it through the tree limbs. The 3 chicks look a little older than the four in the other nest.

The only other photo I took at Ding is a group of Roseate Spoonbills and a Reddish Egret along Wildlife Drive.

We stopped by the Bailey Tract to see if there were any Black-Necked Stilts. We lucked up and saw two that didn’t seem to mind getting their photos taken.

It’s that time of year when we start seeing a lot of these huge lubber grasshoppers.

Dragonflies always fascinate me. They come in so many different colors. It’s quite hard to catch them being still enough to photograph. This one hovered over me and let me get several photos of it. The first pic looks as if it only has 3 wings. The second photo taken a split second later shows the 4th wing.

We have seen a beautiful Swallow-Tailed Kite flying low overhead at our home for a few days. I finally got a couple of photos of it yesterday. I love to watch them sailing overhead.

Today’s blog started out sad, so I’ll end it on a pleasant note with photos of pretty butterflies in our yard.