Saw some interesting things during lunch today

[Dogfish]

I take my lunch to a kids fishin' hole here in Olympia. I like to look out at the water, read, watch the ducks come in and move about, etc. Every once in a while I am treated to the sight of an eagle or osprey scooping a fish out of the water. Today I saw a red tailed hawk catch a mouse. Pretty cool.

I saw four groups of ducks on the lake today. Two groups were hooded mergansers and they were just going to town on all of the trout plants the WDFW had put in the lake this summer. There were more than 100 sawbills out there.

The other two groups were Spoonbills, aka shovelers. I like to call the drakes backwards mallards. There must have been more than 60 of these just paddling in circles with their heads in the water.

My comment is that I have never seen large groups of these particular species before. I have had small groups of both fly by, or have run into a group of 6-8 mergansers on a given river, but never in groups the size of these. Anybody else notice a large movement of birds lately?

I have yet to see large groups of mallards about, but I did see a flock of skittish Canada geese.

Andy

[birdhunter]

There's some movement going about. We get lots of the geese flying around here from the refuges. They've been here for a few weeks. I'm seeing more birds moving, although not in groups quite as big as you described. Northern birds coming down too. I finally saw a gadwall and a pintail this last weekend. Going to try to cut them off this weekend and weekend after that there's a big duck shoot scheduled for around Portland. They better be here by then!