We took the day off today...

We took the day off today ... and drove (with our three dogs) down to Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, which is about 40 minutes from our house.  There's a 12 mile long loop road through the marshy refuge, and we spent almost three hours exploring it.  The temperature was just above freezing (37°F), and many of the shallower areas were iced over.  We saw thousands upon thousands of tundra swans, innumerable ducks (some of the quite beautiful) that we couldn't identify (our bird book is still in a box somewhere!), four great blue herons, many cormorants,  a bazillion Canadian geese, one cheeky marsh wren, several dozen hawks, a bald eagle, grebes, and lots of coots.  In other words, we saw a lot of birds!

I took some photos to try to give a flavor of the place, and in one of them you just might be able to pick out the hundreds of white dots – tundra swans, as photographed without a telephoto lens :)