Spring

It is a grey day.  To look at it, it could be one of those grey fall days where I was introduced to the outdoors beyond my own neighborhood.  My Dad would wake me before the sun and take me on his day long duck and squirrel hunting trips.  In Minnesota, that meant grey and cold - cold fingers, cold feet.  Yes, it could be a fall day, to look at it, but it is not.  Something is in the air that tells you that this is different.  The fall days seem to end on a sharp note.  Everything has taken a step back, there's a warning in a fall day.  Today is different.  With each moment there is a bit more scent, a note that life is coming out from hiding, a bit more birdsong.  To look at it, it might be fall.  To inhale it, it is most definitely spring.  At the end of the day you know there will be more.  Happy Birthday Dad.

I spot the first kingfisher since freeze up just two bends down from the Foote Bridge.  Not much further and I find an osprey in a tree. 

When I pass the stone arch bridge, the osprey start to get serious.  My first great egret of the season flies across the river up ahead. 

if looks could kill

I find a handsome loon at the railroad bridge where the tidal current runs strongest.  It makes rather short dives always surfacing a bit farther away from me.

Loon

The Sneak is full and wide as the tide is nearing high.  It seems that most of the osprey that nest in this area are already here.  They sit on nest boxes and the power pole nest, which is knocked down by the utilities each fall, is being rebuilt.  Knowing that the osprey would just build anyway, the utility company puts traffic cones over the wires to keep the nest from shorting the power.  The opsprey population is probably 90% of what will nest here.

I leave the Sneak and enter Bailey Creek and then the Neck River.  The light wind goes calm and the surface takes on the same watercolor wash that the sky has.  And then I turn back up the East River and back.