Sunday Morning in Lucy Park

I haven't gone birding in Lucy Park in a while. Lucy Park is closer to my house than Lake Wichita Park, but when I leave the driveway, I turn more often to the lake and the Chat Trail, where it seems there are more birds. The last several times I have been to Lucy Park, the birding has been average, and comments from other bird club members makes me think they are having little luck there as well.

However, seeing the Northern Waterthrush yesterday got me excited about the possibility of seeing warblers on their fall migration, although it is a little early. Lucy Park should be perfect as it is a riparian woodlands habitat. I was obviously too early as I didn't see any warblers. Unfortunately, I didn't see much of anything. I used to bird Lucy Park almost every weekend and often saw good birds (which infers other birds are bad, which isn't the case, but fellow birders will know what I mean.)

Anyway, today I walked the circle trail and also the path to the waterfall. I didn't take the pathway to Williams Park today as it was getting just too hot for that long of a walk. What struck me was how quiet the woods were--there were not many birds singing this morning, with the exception of an exuberant Carolina wren.

I followed his call and of course, when I was close, he stopped singing. I sat down on one of the large flat rocks along the trail to drink some water and wait for him to sing again to get a look. A few minutes later, a little brown bird flew out of the cedar tree to another tree about 10 yards aways. I moved down the trail and was able to watch the wren sing away. When the wren moved, he must have crossed the line into another wren's territory, because less than a minute after he started singing, another Carolina wren came flying from the other direction and lighted on the same tree. He was obviously agitated and was giving the singing wren a piece of his mind.

Besides the wren, my walk was uneventful. I saw the following birds: mourning dove, white-winged dove, Eurasian collared dove, blue jay, cardinal, Mississippi kite, purple martin, pigeon, Carolina chickadee, mockingbird, European starling, robin, tufted titmouse, red-winged blackbird, house finch, and cattle egret.

There were lots of butterflies and dragonflies/damselflies. If I had been looking for those, it would have been a great morning. But it was nice to get out and get a little exercise before settling down to work on the computer the rest of the day.