Earlier in October, Justine and I took a trip out to Reifel for a walk around, get some fresh air and see what birds were about. It was so long ago that I don’t really remember much about the day, so this post is photo heavy, without a lot of commentary.

Red-winged blackbird -good light to show off the red in his wing.

There were a crazy number of blue herons on the large pond near the entrance.

Four, female green-winged teals rooting around in the mud.

As always, the chickadees were abundant.

The bald eagles are starting to return. There have not been a lot of them around, but we’re starting to see a few.

The male green-winged teal was off in another part of the sanctuary, quite far off from the females.

One thing that made this trip a bit special was that the snow geese were about. There were huge flocks of them out on the flats on the ocean. They would blast off making a huge amount of noise, flying along the ocean edges, settling down and then taking off again.

I may have actually been burying the lead - we had a new bird that was not supposed to be in our area - an American Avocet! This large shore bird is not around normally, so all the hardcore birders were very excited. It is quite a beautiful bird.

There are lots of shorebirds around this time of year.

Gadwall

Justine liked this pic of the mallards sitting on the logs. The light was nice too.

As we were heading towards the exit, we had a nice encounter with (what I think) a lesser yellowlegs. Not 100% on the ID. He was doing a bit of fishing in the shallow pond, and we watched as he caught something!