Today was a frustrating day....so I took a walk

Currently I am in the midst of trying to get everything together before I leave for Maine on Friday. I have been planning for this 2 month trip since February, but it has finally hit me that it will actually happen. I have already put both my Etsy shops on vacation mode until July 16th at which time I will reopen them.
While in Maine I will be collecting data on the presence of wildlife near Acadia National Park. This work is for my masters thesis which I will be writing next year. I hope to also get lots of great photos while I am in Maine and I hope to be able to post a few of them per week here on this blog, so be sure to "follow" me for photographic updates on how my trip is going.
However, as of today I don't really have a solid plan of how the wildlife sampling will go, and so I was getting frustrated with the whole thing. What did I do? I took a walk to the nearest pond to see if the ducklings had hatched yet this year.
Not only did the ducklings hatch already, but there are about 5-7 batches of them running around! Last year there were only about 3-4
batches of these chirpy balls of fluff. Some of them are more talkative then the others....

There are so many Mallard ducks at the pond now that fights often break out. The female Mallards sure are courageous fighters!













There was one very exciting thing that happened while I was sitting very still and watching the ducklings peck at the spots on my shoes.....I saw a LIVE Indigo Bunting! The last time I saw one of these birds was on the side of a road and it had been hit by a car. This one was actually comfortable enough to take a bath while I shot many photos of him.

To finish off my exciting outing I captured an elusive chipmunk munching on something and then the sun started to get low in the sky and everyone was starting to get sleepy...