Nine folks participated in the monthly group bird and nature walk on the Bunny Run this morning. We had beautiful overcast weather and here are a few highlights from the walk. Fall migration is underway and we were very fortunate to see an impressive example of it. Near the spring we watched a group of 60-70 Turkey Vultures kettling (riding a column of warm air up to gain altitude) and then streaming off to the south. I took this photo showing a few of them, but it doesn't compare to our experience of actually seeing this group of birds:
Birds are not the only animals the migrate, and throughout the morning we also saw a few Monarch Butterflies high in the sky flying south. We saw this one feeding on Frostweed flowers:
On the sandy prairie area we had a surprising close encounter with another migrating bird. A single American Pipit flew towards us from the west. I thought it would fly right over us, but it descended and landed right beside us, about 10 feet away! We watched it for a few moments before it flew away, continuing east. I guess we were all standing still enough that it didn't immediately recognize us as a group of people.
Near the end of our walk we were watching one of several Eastern Phoebes seen during the morning in a distant tree. It flew towards us, grabbed something about 10 feet away from us, and flew to another tree much closer to us. It had caught a dragonfly and we watched as it whacked the dragonfly against the branch it perched on, then swallowed it whole. I got this poor photo:
All in all we found 21 species of birds. Here's our complete list:
Here are the iNaturalist observations we made:
And here are the same photos on Flickr:
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