Wild Delaware

These young osprey are ready to fledge and will soon soar above the wetlands that surround Cape Henlopen State Park. Nearby the rich waters of the Delaware Bay and Lewes and Rehoboth canal provide a fishing paradise.

OK, I admit Osprey are one of my favorite subjects. Today I was able to get very close to this fledgling. Here are two rather intimate portraits.

Today dawned with a huge red sun magnified by a layer of haze hugging the horizon. My son Jay took me by boat to a rookery on Indian River Bay that we had photographed several times before. The Great Egrets and Great Blue Herons were there as expected along with a flock of Oyster Catchers and a special prize for me, a Clapper Rail. I’ve seen Clapper Rails before but only for a second or two at a time as they disappear into a thick, green thatch of salt marsh cordgrass.  Before we left, we saw a female Red-Winged Blackbird and Brown Pelicans.  In less than two hours we had witnessed a nice variety of wildlife and the dawn of a beautiful day.

Great Egret

Great Egrets

Oyster Catchers

Clapper Rail

female Red-winged Blackbird

Brown Pelicans

A Snowy Egret is surrounded by hungry gulls that would try to make the egret drop the fish it caught. The gulls were successful several times and the egret gave up and left the area.

Northern Green Frogs are common along much of the East Coast where they inhabit fresh water ponds, streams and marshes. This guy may look calm enough but he is waiting for something – almost anything – to wander by. Northern Green Frogs eat pretty much any living thing they can capture and swallow.

An Osprey brings a half-eaten carp toward its nest in Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge near Broadkill Beach this morning.  Normally, the males do most of the fishing and eat their fill of the catch before returning to the nest. There are at least three nesting pairs of Osprey near the fresh-water impoundment on the refuge there and the fish are plentiful this year.

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Take one look at this beautiful terrapin and it is easy to see why our neighbor, the State of Maryland, would name the Diamondback their state reptile. Once plentiful in the brackish water surrounding the Delaware Bay, the Diamondback was considered a delicacy and was hunted almost to extinction in the early 1900s. This terrapin was photographed this morning along the edge of Rehoboth Bay and has some barnacles hitching a ride on her diamondback.

If you are a Great Egret scratching you throat is quite a balancing act.

Summer must be a tough time to be a fox as their thin coats look a little ragged and this guy was covered with big ticks. On the positive side, food is plentiful and the hunting is easy.

A Black-crowned Night-Heron emerges from the late-day shadows at Bombay Hook yesterday. This nocturnal feeder is the most widespread heron in the world being at home on five continents. In Delaware they are much less common than many other herons and often harder to find and photograph as they often feed at dusk and at night.