An amazing day of sightings in the Rouge

[Nightskies4us]

What an incredible walk.  I tried to post this a week ago or so.
It started with a clear sighting and sound of the Pileated Woodpecker flying over the east arm of the Rouge River this morning. Then just shortly after that we had a White Tail Deer cross 75 feet in front of us. Then we went to see if we could see the Snapping Turtles, bingo. There was the smaller one. What an amazing walk.
I almost forgot, we saw a Hawk being badgered by a small bird. Not to weird right, this small bird was actually landing on the Hawk's back while it was flying and attacking it. Three of us saw this happening for about 2 minutes, it was really cool.
The worst part of this was I didn't have my camera this time.
That makes 4 deer sightings, 3 Snapping Turtle sightings and 4 Pileated Woodpecker sightings since spring in the Rouge Valley Conservation Area.
Karsten

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[Kin Lau]

Lots of stuff to see in the Rouge.

Sounds like you were further north in the Rouge, around Twyn Rivers area?

Down at Rouge Beach, there are currently hundreds of both Cliff and Bank swallows and about a dozen Barn Swallows.

[Greg Schneider]

Do the swallows nest there too? Sounds like a fun opportunity if you can get close enough to get a few photos of them in their burrows. We have bank swallows at Burloak park, but with high water levels one has to shoot from a walkway which is quite a distance away.

[Kin Lau]

The bank swallows are all out of their burrows already. They're all hanging out on the wires. You can get shots of the parents feeding the young ones. They all flush everytime VIA rail and the GO train comes by, which is about every 5 mins, so there's _alot_ of flight shot opts.

The cliff swallows are still in their nests.