Wild Delaware

Christmas Eve sunrise today brought an interesting assortment of wildlife from snow geese passing the setting full moon to an immature bald eagle to a great blue heron. Sometimes you wonder at 5:00 a.m. if it would be ok to sleep in. And then you have a morning like this…

This was the morning I have been hoping for with good light finally and a marsh full of ducks. When these mallards blasted off just after sunrise I knew it was a good day at the “office.”

Oh, the weather outside is frightful. At least for a photographer as there are heavy clouds today with more of the same predicted for the next few days. That makes wildlife photography very difficult with flat, gray light. Here are a few images from the past week when there was better light.

Sporting a “mohawk” only a merganser could wear, this duck has an early morning flap at Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge.

Chicago has O’Hare, Atlanta has Hartsfield and New York has Kennedy International but this fresh-water impoundment at Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge has more take off and landings every day than all three airports together. Tens of thousands of snow geese and ducks come and go from this refuge daily and I have yet to witness a mid-air collision despite all of the traffic.

Northern harriers fight over a duck that had been killed by the raptors earlier in the day on a salt marsh at Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge. I watched for about 45 minutes as four different harriers came to feed on the carcass. In Delaware northern harriers are commonly called marsh hawks as they are usually seen flying low over marshes searching for small birds and mammals.

This morning I found a great blue heron that found a small crab in the shallow water of Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge.

Ducks were plentiful on the marsh this morning and after several days of rain and dark, heavy clouds I was very happy to be back shooting photographs in good light. The fresh-water pothole at Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge I photographed last week was busy again today with pintails coming and going all morning. In the second photograph three female hooded mergansers hunt for fish in the shallows of a nearby salt marsh. The third photograph is a male hooded merganser with a drop of water on the end of his bill.

Dawn broke cold over the saltmarsh and fresh-water impoundments at Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge this morning.

A great blue heron was fishing the edge of a Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge salt marsh last night but a thin layer of icy slush made seeing below the surface difficult. After maybe 10 minutes of stalking he managed to catch a minnow.