Lincoln Sparrow!

Lincoln Sparrow

I arrived at the park at 8:00. It was 49  degrees and sunny. A perfect October day!

I ran into Haynes and some other folks and we walked around together. In the lower gardens were robins and song sparrows, goldfinches, and some swamp sparrows. This lincoln sparrow was perched nearby and surprisingly got a halfway decent picture of him in his Harris tweed coat as Haynes likes to say. It was a good view of his buffy coloration near the breast. A flock of grackles flew overhead as well as some herring gulls. One of the first juncos to arrive was present joining our overwintering cardinals, blue jays and house finches.

As we headed to the upper gardens, we could hear a towhee calling "wheeeeet", although we never got to see him. I like to hope that we will have another overwintering towhee this year like we did a few years ago, but it's probably a long shot. There were some mourning doves, titmice and song sparrows. I caught a brief glimpse of a largish yellow bird which, thankfully, someone else witnessed too. After much discussion about it's yellow coloring and darkish gray wings, we finally settled on a female or young tanager. Cormorants in their "V" shape flew overhead. We saw a flicker and someone saw some black polls. Chippers foraged near the waste pile, chickadees hung upside down on sunflower heads trying to get the last of the seeds and a red-tailed hawk flew up above.

We revised the lower garden again and saw cowbirds, an eastern phoebe, yellow-rumps and a Merlin that flew quickly by, but all who saw it agreed that's what it was.

Down by the soccer field and pond area, was a red-bellied woodpecker, some nuthatches, robins, a hermit thrush (which only some saw), a female yellow-rump and a ruby-crowned kinglet!