A lazy day with little real birding effort, but several notable sightings
nevertheless. At 7am 3 woodcock were displaying near our house, seen from my
driveway. Later in the morning I went to Leesylvania State Park hoping for a
FOS osprey. No dice on the osprey, but there was a nice mix of ducks in
Powell’s Creek, although in much reduced numbers from a month ago. These
included black duck, mallard, pintail, canvasback, redhead, lesser scaup,
bufflehead, ruddy duck, common merganser, and red-breasted merganser. Also
seen were pied-billed and horned grebes, and rusty blackbird along the
boardwalk. In Neabsco Creek were many black ducks and mallards, plus a dozen
green-winged teal and some pintails. In the afternoon as I was doing some yard
work 3 red-shouldered hawks put on a nice show of chasing each other around and
yelling. Very entertaining. Finally, I flushed a sharp-shinned hawk out of
the holly behind our feeder.
Marc Ribaudo
Woodbridge
