Birding on Labor Day

I got up early on Monday morning to meet a sibling and go birding at the Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge.  My goals were to see a gallinule and a dickcissel.  Turns out I saw neither one of those but we had a great time anyway.  We saw crows, ravens, sand hill cranes, kingfishers, a Tennessee warbler, common yellow throat, great blue herons, great egrets, eagles, harrier hawks, blue jays, crowds of red winged blackbirds, tree swallows, phoebes, great crested flycatchers, red necked grebe, possibly a yellow breasted chat, and ducks.  Ducks are hard to identify for me.  I know for sure we saw mallards but I'm not sure of the other ones were canvasbacks or scaup.  We saw a pair of ravens sitting in a dead tree.  One of them had something bloody in it's mouth-possible part of a frog or snake.  It was interesting watching the raven swallow that large morsel.  We saw a red necked grebe pop up out of the water like a submarine with a big, fat bullhead in it's mouth.  The bullhead was a good six inches long and the grebe struggled with it.  Sometimes the grebe would take the fish down under the water.  If it was trying to kill the fish by drowning it, that wasn't going to work.  The grebe popped up and down in the water struggling with the bullhead and gradually swimming away from us for about 5 minutes before it got the fish pointed head first and swallowed it.  Our most amazing nature sight was on a dead pine tree in the distance. The 30 foot pine tree had been dead a long time and had no needles on it but it still held that triangular shape.  Evenly distributed on the pine's branches were 17 great egrets.  And on the very top, like a Christmas tree topper, sat a great blue heron.  Each great egret sat tall so that if you blurred your eyes and ignored the lack of green color, it looked like a German Christmas tree adorned with white candlesticks.  And here I was without a camera.  Four other great egrets sat in a nearby dead oak tree.  Is it time for egrets to prepare for migration already?  I'm not ready to let them go yet.