With daylight savings time rolling back the clock and a cloudy day, I wasn’t expecting much this afternoon down at Oyster Bay Regional Park. The light was pretty poor and murky (Oyster Bay is better in the morning when you can sit on the beach with the sun behind you photographing ducks on the water in the bay) and most of the ducks on the water were backlit.

As I was walking out along the dyke towards the breakwater I spotted two birds relatively low in a tree ahead of me. One flushed fairly quickly but the other stuck around long enough for me to get a couple of pictures. I was repositioning to approach it from a slightly different angle when the second bird flushed as well. I’m pretty happy with the light in this image and I like the framing effect of the branches.

The funny thing was that as I moved down through the driftwood and onto the beach several other Northern Flickers (Colaptes auratus) flushed out of the logs and grass at the top of the beach making for at least a half dozen flickers in one very small space. I’m not sure why there were so many in this somewhat odd location, but it was great to get a good view of them up close!

There are plenty of ducks on the water at Oyster Bay – large flocks of American Wigeon and Green-winged Teal. Maybe I’ll try a morning trip to get some decent photographs of those.