Walking with Birders
I returned to Seven Islands Birding Park for a walk and took some pictures with my phone of a number of the birds, including a gulp of swallows.
The Seven Islands Birding Park is a favorite destination of mine, but I haven’t been there in a while. The park has changed since I started going there a few years back. They paved one of the main trails, ostensibly to control erosion (it had been very rutted and washed out), and they built a bridge across a channel of the French Broad River to Newman’s Island.
This island sits in the middle of the French Broad River, and there is a loop trail that leads along the coastline of the entire island. I had gone on this trail once over a year ago with my father just after they had opened up the bridge and so I had been on this trail before. Today was a gray day, but there were plenty of birds around. Now, you might expect that, since it is a birding park, but I have been on some days and not seen much of any avifauna. But today there were lots of swallows around (I think they were swallows and one of the other walkers called them such) and they were swarming all over the river.
Now, as a side note, I looked it up, and it appears that the collective term for swallows could be flight, but there are some really interesting ones, such as a swoop, a kettle, a richness, or (and this is my favorite) a gulp. Ain’t language fun?
There was also a gaggle of geese hanging around the river, swimming or just standing around on drifting logs. And I saw a heron-like bird swoop by at one point, quicker than I was able to get a camera in place. And speaking of cameras, I didn’t have my handy DSLR this time, because the battery was dead, and I didn’t want to wait on it. So, these images were with my phone. They weren’t bad, but I am looking forward to having a charged DSLR for my next outing.
I got there before the crowds, but as I was on my way back, the birders were flocking to the park with some impressive equipment to get shots of the birds that were all about. I am in no way a birder, as much as I enjoy watching birds, but I can certainly appreciate those who are. That takes patience and time to get those great pictures.
