After a Storm

Yesterday, the edge of a winter storm came through with lots of wind and rain. This morning was calm and in the upper 30's. I wanted to see how things were in the bay so I got an earlier than normal start. The wind would gradually rise throughout the two hours I was on the water. I spotted the eagles right away although later I noticed that there are now at least three eagles in the bay. I saw two northern pintails during the trip. There are more geese in the bay also. There were more herons than usual. I saw two adult otters. I don't think they are from the five member otter family that I've reported on before. In the photo - For a few years there has been this 20 foot long culvert section up against the cattails and I always figured that it must be too heavy to move. A couple of weeks ago, I went over and gave it a bump and it turned out to be filled with floatation foam. So, today I tied a rope to it and towed it a few hundred yards to where I could wrestle it onto dry land where a road crew will eventually be tasked with hauling it away. It's a bit of semi-bandit-good-deed-earth-stewardship. It sure was fun wrestling the bastard out of the water. But I'm really glad I won't have to look at that thing out in the marsh anymore. At the end of todays trip I watched two eagles hunt ducks for about a 1/2 hour. It appeared that they wounded a coot as all of the others flew off except the one. The eagle would circle and take runs at the coot while the coot tried to spend as much time as possible underwater. After a few minutes, the eagle would rest in the trees and the coot would swim toward safety. This happened three times before the coot finally escaped to hide in the brush.