On December 9 of this year, I went to a large, human-made impoundment in southeastern Pennsylvania to see what water birds would be active and visible. The lake was surrounded by deciduous woods and has a wooded island in the middle of it.
The first water bird I saw, soon after arriving at the lake, was a ponderous, immature bald eagle that was soaring in the gusty wind over the lake. It also swooped gracefully low to the water occasionally, as if about to snare a fish, but then swept upward without making a catch.
While watching the eagle, I saw a fast-moving line of ducks powering low over the impoundment with the wind, circle into it and land in the middle of the lake, in a line stretched across the wind-driven water. Studying those ducks with my 16 power binoculars, I saw they were 21 buffleheads. The genders were equal in number. And once on the water, the buffleheads stayed there resting during the hour and a half I was along the lake.
Soon after seeing the buffleheads, I noticed a great blue heron flying majestically low across the lake. It might have been looking for another fishing spot along the gravelly shoreline.
For a while I saw only the heaving water, blue sky billowed with gray clouds and the grayish-brown, deciduous woods, spotted with green juniper and white pine trees. Then a few ring-billed gulls arrived over the lake, followed by more and still more. One minute there were no gulls to be seen, and the next minute they seemed to be everywhere in the sky, gliding round and round. The ring-bills coasted and circled on outstretched wings, and seemed to play in the wind. All the while more gulls flew to the lake, probably from nearby fields and parking lots where they were looking for food. Some of the gulls landed into the wind on the waves and white caps of the impoundment while others continued to swirl over the lake. The gulls landed into the wind for better flight control. Meanwhile, more and more gulls came to the lake from wherever they were. And many more of the airborne gulls dropped to the rafts of bobbing gulls forming on the tossing water. Little by little, more gulls flew to the lake and more of them landed in the white and pale-gray rafts of their species the rest of the time I was along the water until there was at least a few hundred of them bouncing on the impoundment.
As I scanned the hundreds of gulls on the water, I noticed that most of them were ring-bills as stated earlier. But I also saw that there were a couple dozen herring gulls in those ring-bill rafts. All gulls of both species were obviously rocking and resting on the restless water.
Ring-billed gulls have been numerous inland for many years. And I think they have attracted other kinds of gulls, in more recent years, to winter inland as well, including herring, great black-backed and lesser black-backed gulls, all of which can be spotted on inland impoundments in winter.
While the gulls were putting on quite a show, a few noisy flocks of Canada geese flew in V's over the lake at intervals. They probably were going to feeding fields of waste corn kernels or winter rye.
Their gatherings are always exciting to hear and see.
Suddenly, all the gulls lifted off the water at once, forming a blizzard of birds, and swirled away. Knowing that bald eagles can make flocks of gulls fly away in panic, I scanned the sky for an eagle or two and saw the same immature bald in the sky close to where the gulls were on the water. Within seconds the lake was empty of gulls except one. I looked at it with my field glasses and noticed it was floating on its back with its legs weakly kicking the air. Although I didn't see it happen, the eagle must have attacked that gull, badly wounding it.
The eagle swooped down to the gull a few times, but didn't pick it off the water. Then it soared out of sight. But, after several minutes, the eagle swept down to the now-dead gull, lifted its victim off the water with its sharp, curved talons and flew away with it to a wooded shoreline to, presumably, eat its prey.
There weren't many kinds of water birds seen around that impoundment that day, but each species seen presented an interesting show. A person can't know what life is around any given habitat until he or she looks for it. But every species seen is intriguing.
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