Western Grebe

Saturday
Today we drove up to Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, about an hour and a half drive to the north, near Brigham City. We had visited before when we were visiting Jen and Jason for Thanksgiving in 2015, not the best time for seeing birds, but a beautiful time to enjoy the landscapes, since the water was fairly low and still, giving beautiful reflections of snow-capped mountains in the water. Today was quite different - the water levels were higher, in fact so high that a week ago the access road to the 12-mile auto tour road was partially flooded, and even today, there was still a patch of water we had to drive through. The swallows apparently had just arrived from Mexico about a week ago, and were busy building their nests under the eaves of the Visitor Center among other places, and there were just huge numbers of them dipping and swooping over the water. Unfortunately (for us) there were also huge swarms of insects around at intervals, making us reluctant to leave the car in places, or even open the windows! There were also large numbers of red-winged blackbirds and yellow-headed blackbirds - a new sighting for me. The bird I chose for my blip is the Western grebe, also a new sighting for me, and we were thrilled to see a brief display of their courtship ritual, where they appear to be almost running on the water with their necks outstretched. Then we also saw many American avocets, White- faced ibis, both unfortunately too distant to photograph, white pelicans, a great blue heron downing a huge fish, a Sand hill crane and others - a wonderful afternoon! Once we got a home we had a welcome cup of tea, then I went out with Jen to do a bit of grocery shopping, then Roger and I went out to enjoy a walk in the early evening sun, while Jen and Jason fixed dinner. After dinner we had a game of Scrabble, with Jason thrashing us, but thanks to the tiles we had left I managed to pull ahead of Jen into second place!