Winter in the Shawangunk Grasslands
With our day off on President’s Day, we decided to go birding at the Shawangunk Grasslands National Wildlife Refuge. With a bit of research, I learned that the best time to visit is around 4pm. Our hope was to see some wintering raptors and maybe some Eastern Bluebirds. We sometimes “hear” Eastern Bluebirds in the Merlin App in our backyard, but we’ve yet to see one visiting our feeders.
We arrived around 3:30pm just in time to snag the last available parking spot near the trails. I didn’t appreciate how crowded it would be. We’ve been to The Grasslands before and its never been so packed. Perhaps we’ve just never been there at owl time. We also don’t usually visit during winter.
On arrival we didn’t see much bird activity, but there were lots of people with their cameras. The Grasslands has a lookout area that was full of people with more serious cameras than ours, so we decided to walk down the trail. As a noob birding and bird photography, I definitely felt intimidated by the number of folks who appeared to be very serious birders (judging by their telephoto lenses).
As we walked down the part of the path that was open toward a less occupied (by humans) area we stopped off to turn our cameras on and get the shooting mode right. I use a Canon EOS R7. I decided to work on Fv mode with as fast a shutter speed as possible. In hindsight, I probably should have limited the ISO as well because I have a bit of noise in my photos. I used the RF 100-400 lens which let me get some nice shots (but after today I’m eying the RF 200-800 lens…). I took a test shot of a tree:
As we walked down trail, Alek spotted a bird diving into the grass toward a closed off area. There was another photographer down there so as we approached he pointed out where it dove into the grass. He let us know that what we were waiting for was a female Northern Harrier. Yay! We’d hopefully get some good raptor shots!
After she came up out of the grass, she flew around a bit more. I captured a nice shot of her banded tail while she flew away.
 |
| Female Northern Harrier |
Before too long she seemed to catch her dinner and landed on a toppled tree to eat it.
 |
| Northern Harrier takes a break from dinner to pose for photo |
After I took about 300 photos of her sitting there eating, she flew off and I lost track of her. Alek and I decided to look around a bit more to see what other birds we could find. We noticed a few flocks of geese in the far distance.
After seeing these geese, Alek noticed some movement on the downed tree again. The same or another Northern Harrier was occupying a different spot on the branches.
We’d heard people say that the owls show up between 4:30 and 5 and that yesterday they were closer to the parking area. So we started to head in that direction to take some photos. I thought I’d heard a raven call while looking at the Harrier, but didn’t see any around. But soon we got to see a raven flying with some owls! To be clear, we had no idea what birds we were photographing until we got home and looked at the photos. When the birds were so high, it was a bit hard to get the camera to focus with only the sky ask background, but I did manage to get a few good shots.
 |
| Raven surrounded by Short-eared Owls |
The owls grew more active, and I managed to get some nice shots of them above the grass.
After this Short-Eared owl landed on a nearby tree we realized the birds we’d been tracking had been owls for a while!
The eastern bluebird still remains elusive to us, but it was a successful trip regardless!