Maybe because I've been getting up extra early this week or maybe because I really am a birder, it was easier to get up this morning. I spent 2 1/2 hours looking at birds with my ornithology class. What fun! We had 12 in our group pooled into 3 cars. We drove around Diamond Lake in Dayton. Here's what we saw: flocks of mallards, flocks of Canadian honkers, flocks of cormorants, flocks of coots, 2 bald eagles (1 immature), common mergansers, hooded mergansers, red breasted mergansers, harrier, 3 bufflehead (see above - aren't they the cutest? They're the panda bears of ducks), 4 loons, many song sparrows, 3 sand hill cranes, 3 trumpeter swans, tree swallows, a hermit thrush, ring-necked ducks, a pair of red headed ducks, killdeer, robins, grackles, starlings, and red winged blackbirds. I am borrowing a spotting scope and I love it. I can really bring a bird into view. I'll have to get one for myself someday. We sat and watched the immature bald eagle sitting on the top of a tree for the longest time. Some people were watching it for a half hour before we came. After a while the eagle started peeling the bark off the tree. We thought it was eating something at first but it was just peeling bark. One guy was watching it closely. He said, "Look, its gonna do something!" We all trained our binoculars on the eagle. "It's gonna do something," he said again and then, "Oh, it crapped." The poor immature eagle has absolutely no privacy with a group like us around watching.
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