The Central New Mexico Audobon Society runs a “Thursday Birding” event each week, an informal get together of birding friends. Each week we gather at a reasonably convenient location for a morning of birding.
Today we went to the Tingley Beach park in central Albuquerque; the Beach is adjacent to the Rio Grande bosque and is administrated by both the Albuquerque BioPark and the Rio Grande State Park. The park includes relatively wild bosque riparian woodlands and developed ponds for fishing and waterfowl habitat.
A Great Blue Heron was not up yet this morning. GHB’s spend most of the day fishing in shallow marshes, but like to roost in nearby trees for the night.
The Belted Kingfisher was up and on the job early today.
Cormorants were also lining up for breakfast. Game and Fish stocked the ponds with 1800 trout last week, so these birds already looked fat.
Cedar Waxwings are such beautiful birds. We found a flock of a dozen or so feasting on Russian Olive fruit.
They will go upside down for the goodies.
Robins aren’t particularly rare, but they are colorful in the morning sun.
Back over at the ponds we saw some nice waterfowl.
This Wigeon was calmly feeding.
Ringneck Ducks are a regular handsome bird at Tingley.
This was the only Pintail we saw.
Here’s a Greater Scaup. Looks like he is getting ready to molt.
One of our last good birds was a female Goldeye.
She was diving and feeding normally, but with 10x binoculars we saw that she had a loop of monofilament fishing line around one of her feet.
I called Game and Fish, who patched me into a wildlife rescue organization. I soon got a text letting me know that a specialist would soon check up on the bird and try to catch and free her.
If I get any more info I’ll post the outcome.
Oher than the Goldeneye’s problem, we all had a very nice morning. If you are in Abq you should visit Tingley Beach. It’s free and right in the middle of town.