all creatures great and small
Unusual sighting
As I’ve mentioned in other shots today, in all my years of coming here I’ve never spotted one of our large fish eating birds, actively hunting in this brook that connects the first two lakes here at Clove Lakes park. Save possibly for one winter when I spotted a great blue here during a winter storm, and even then he just walked around, I never saw him in the active hunting poise I see them in when they are in one of the large fish filled lakes here.
But today was a highly unusual day. It had rained cats dogs, and baby zebras yesterday. The rain was so heavy I knew it was going to have a dramatic effect on this lake here near my house, so as I was on vacation for a few days I chose to come here today and grab some shots of the post storm repercussions, and there definitely were some.
The rain washed tons of mud into the lake, giving it a nice golden color if the sun hit it at just the right angle at just the right time of day. That resulted in a nice couple of shots of some swallows doing their amazing flighty dance about a branch overlooking the mud filled waters, the color of which in the background added nicely to the shots.
It also affected the speed of the current. Usually slow and gently flowing from the waterfall through the rocks, instead it was a powerful running stream covering most of the rocks in a blanket of white water, and making quite a distinct loud noise as it rushed by.
The water overflow was so intense it even washed one of the rowboats from the marina all the way from the other end of the lake completely over the falls. One other thing washed into the once gentle flowing stream were fishes and lots of them from the lake on the other side of this fall.
Normally fish avoid that area and so never get swept over the falls into this one. So the only birds I see wading in the water here are ducks and night heron’s. But with the massive storm dumping so much excess water into the lake yesterday, the intensely agitated current swept up lots of fish, trapped here with no way to get back up the waterfall, and a perilous quarter mile journey down this shallow rocky stream to the next lake.
Hence my never before capture of not just one but two of our large fish hunting birds staking out an ideal perch here at a spot I’ve only ever captured diminutive night heron’s hunting at prior to today.
Our plucky little night heron was here too, and never happier, though he had to share his once exclusive hunting ground with these two, like it or not. Fortunately for him, there were fish enough for everybody. Not only still able to hunt for his normal fair of snails and other crawly things, but fishes for once. And one small fish provided the much smaller night heron a meal 100 times more filling than a pea sized invertebrates he normally finds here.
In the meantime these two here had a ball catching fish that could neither run nor hide from their razor sharp eyes and quick beaks.
