Mount Loretto 7/9--Silhouettes & Songs

A bright, beautiful morning at Mount Loretto, sun in a cloudless sky, you'd think it would be perfect for bird watching, but, as it happens, much of the time it was too sunny and birds were back lit showing only silhouettes, or else they were bird shapes flying across what ballplayers call a "high sky." So, looking at my day list, I see I was identifying a lot of birds simply by shape or song. Obviously the egret above is easy but the Wood Duck below was something of a challenge.

That's a pretty good representation of how it looked on the pond (minus the red circle of course) and it was by the way it swam with its head moving back and forth as though the neck was part of the propulsion system, & then flash of light on the eye showing me that it was in eclipse that led to realize it was a Wood Duck in the dazzling light.

I kept hearing American Goldfinches without seeing them until the very end  of my walk standing in the parking lot when I saw one's silhouette bounce like it was on a trampoline above me. Double-crested Cormorants--most of them sitting on buoy far out in the bay. Yellow Warblers and  Common Yellowthroats singing.  A flash of Northern Flicker rump. Red blurs of cardinals. I heard them much better than I saw them. Chimney Swifts are always silhouettes anyway.  Mourning Dove with a pointed tail. An outline of a Great Blue Heron farther out on the pond above that apparently didn't move a muscle in the 2 hours it took me to come back to it on my circuit of the park. Even the Indigo Bunting was in shadow so that I could barely make out its color, but its sweet, sweet song was unmistakable. The blackbirds though were stand outs--their epaulets almost fluorescent in the sun.

Sometimes I walk along thinking about other things than birding and only realize a few minutes later what bird I just saw or heard. Sometimes I'm okay with that and sometimes I wonder what I'm missing.

29 species plus the shape of a tern too far distant to call in good conscience.
Wood Duck  2
Mallard  5
Double-crested Cormorant  17
Great Blue Heron  3
Great Egret  5
Turkey Vulture  1
Laughing Gull  1
Ring-billed Gull  1
Herring Gull  20
Great Black-backed Gull  2
Sterna sp.  1    Common or Forster's too far out on jetty to tell.
Mourning Dove  1
Chimney Swift  1
Belted Kingfisher  2
Northern Flicker  1
Eastern Kingbird  2
Northern Rough-winged Swallow  3
Tree Swallow  2
Barn Swallow  5
American Robin  7
Gray Catbird  9
Northern Mockingbird  4
European Starling  20
Yellow Warbler  2
Common Yellowthroat  6
Song Sparrow  1
Northern Cardinal  3
Indigo Bunting  1
Red-winged Blackbird  10
American Goldfinch  1