Winter birding

We did a bit of very cold winter birding over the weekend. First, though, as I was driving to the rescue last week, I saw a flock of 20-30 turkeys on the side of the road! I pulled over to take a picture; unfortunately by the time I took it, you can only see 10 of them -- the rest had fled to the safety of the woods. I left as quickly as I could and apologized for disturbing them.On Saturday we went to a local nature preserve. We could not believe how many robins we saw. Aren't they supposed to fly south? Growing up, one of the first signs of spring was a robin sighting. That's a robin in this tree; he had dozens of friends in other trees:
One of the things I love about snow covering is seeing the tracks of the animals. We saw this turkey, but when she saw us, she ran to safety. She was doing some weird stuff around that tree -- wish we could have seen it!
It was so gorgeous! We didn't get a picture, but spent several minutes watching an opossum walking around. There was a flock of mallards down this stream:
We watched this downy woodpecker for several minutes; she allowed us to get quite close to her, so much so that we didn't need to use our binoculars. Earlier, we'd seen a hairy woodpecker -- first time we've seen both in the same trip.
We realized that we need to start dressing warmer for our birding trips since we tend to stop a lot to watch the birds -- it's not like running where we're constantly moving and keeping warm!

But, that reminds me of our run Saturday morning. We could hear two owl hooting back and forth, so we stopped on the path to see if we could locate them in the trees, and one of them flew off to land in another tree. What a treat during an otherwise cold, windy, and unpleasant run!