A Wet and Wild Walk in the Wetland - A to Z Challenge

I'm a day late.  But does my W heavy title make up for it?  I worked 14 hours yesterday and had no time to blog. Sorry!

These past few months we've been walking out at Park Lake Provincial Park.  It is about 15 minutes out of town and the Lake is actually a man-made irrigation reservoir.  (Yes, we are lame like that in Southern Alberta - we make our man-made reservoirs into provincial parks).  Around about a quarter of the lake are wetland areas where there are lots and lots of birds.  It can be a noisy place at times.

I borrowed a friend's extender to try out and managed to get some decent bird pictures in the rain, even with the dogs in tow.

The most common wetland bird I see, is the red-winged black bird.  They've been around for a few weeks now but just recently started hanging out in the wetland, instead of the trees.

The yellow-headed blackbird is my favourite.  They are a close second in terms of "common-ness" but they just arrived this past week at Park Lake.  It was nice to see them again.  It had been a while so I couldn't resist taking lots of photos...

There were pelicans hanging out that we disturbed by accident.  We came around a corner and we spotted each other at the same time.  They didn't fly far though - they just settled further down the lake.

I impressed myself by spotting this pretty, yet plain little girl (a Vesper's Sparrow I think!) in the middle of a field.

And of course what water body is complete without a killdeer.  He was quite a ways away, so not the best pic.

We also saw some Northern Shovelers (which I thought were Mallards until I saw the beak in the half-assed pictures I snapped off so there is nothing decent of them to share) and some Franklin's Gulls.

It was raining during our walk so the park was completely deserted.  It was nice to be able to relax and just let the girls run around as they pleased.  There weren't a lot of ground squirrels braving the wetness today, but there was lots of fresh grass for the girls to munch on and tonnes of smells to keep them busy.