The Harriers

Aiden recently joined a New Hampshire young birder's club called The Harriers.  Basically you join for a small fee and receive a signed Stokes field guide and field notebook, and then can attend a wide range of bird related field trips all over NH and coastal Mass.  On Saturday we took our first field trip with the Harriers, to the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge on Plum Island to look for Snowy Owls.  It was a beautiful windless morning, cloudy but warm enough to be very comfortable outside standing still for good periods of time.  When we arrived, we hit the beach first, where Aiden got his first lifers of the day, a white-winged scoter and an oldsquaw.  Then a huge bald eagle promptly flew right over our heads and out over the surf!

When the group assembled, we headed out the refuge road and it was less than a minute before we spied our first Snowy Owl, perched atop a swallow nest box out in the marsh.  We scoped him for a good while, and then headed out to the Hellcat tower to see what we could see there.  Another Snowy Owl awaited us from an osprey platform, as well as a short eared owl and a rough legged hawk!  Another trip to the the beach yielded razorbill, black scoter, horned grebe, common loon, and a big flock of snow buntings.  Aiden had a great day, but Andy and I are secretly even more excited about this young birders club than Aiden is.  The reason?  We can finally go birding again, with other people even, and not have to worry about whether others will be annoyed that our kids are there, running around, maybe paying attention to birds, but also maybe throwing sticks in the water or digging in the sand or otherwise goofing around.  Yesterday was probably the best birding day we've had in years, so we are all looking forward to more adventures with the Harriers.

Haley declares routinely that she is NOT a birder

On the beach at Plum Island

After our birding, we headed over to Gloucester to meet our new niece and cousin, Finna Stevie Dean.  She is a tiny little cutie, sleepy all the time still (thankfully for M&B).  The kids marveled at their tiny new cousin for a few minutes (Haley got to hold her after mass amounts of hand sanitizer were applied) and then were off with their older cousins playing around the house.  Aiden got a tour of Uncle Micah's office at Mass Division of Marine Fisheries (thrilling if you are a 7 year old boy obsessed with fishing) which included many tanks full of sea creatures and a "beetle tank" where Micah and his co-workers throw dead fish and roadkilled birds and mammal in to be eaten, leaving only the immaculately cleaned bones, which they put up on a display shelf.  Kind of a Far Side type of working environment, if you ask me...

Little Finna

Haley and Finna

Selfie of Mom and Aiden snowshoeing at Kezar Lake