On Saturday, September 24, OCAS in partnership with The Moosalamoo Association held a walk to Silver Lake in Leicester in celebration of National Public Land Day. Starting at the trailhead in Salisbury, our walk up the 1.6 mi. trail was fairly uneventful, not surprising considering we were walking though mature woods on the shady side of a mountain in early morning. Once we got to the lake itself at the top, it was a bit of a different story.

The lake again hosted nesting Common Loons this year, and as soon as we got a view of the water, we got a look at two adults. The chick that I am told was raised there unfortunately eluded us. While looking at them we also had a little micro-flurry of songbirds which were making good use of the sunlit trees around the lake to browse for food. In this flock we saw Dark-eyed Junco, an Blue-headed Vireo with a very fat caterpillar in its bill, a Chestnut-sided Warbler and the briefest look at Golden-crowned Kinglets who were heard making their “seet-seet-seet” call. Another interesting bird with them was a Downy Woodpecker which confounded ID expectations by not having black spots on its outer tail feathers.

When we walked a bit around the lake to get a closer look at the loons, we had a couple more good sightings in a Yellow-rumped Warbler flitting in a Pine Tree, and then a couple Hermit Thrushes which we got unusually long looks at as they fed on staghorn sumac berries. And we did get that closer look at one of the Loons which resulted in the picture that you see above.

Our walk down was mostly as quite as our walk up was, but we did get one more good bird sighting in when we spotted a couple Black-throated Blue Warblers down low in the vegetation.

All of our bird sightings can be seen at the following link:
https://ebird.org/vt/checklist/S119721831