Birdwatching Morning

 

This was the most beautiful day since last autumn, and I took the morning off so that Travalon and I could go birdwatching. I grabbed the binoculars, and he grabbed his good camera. Our first stop was the canoe launch next to the dog park right near our house. We could see ducks swimming around in the mist, and the scene looked so ancient I could almost imagine dinosaurs rising out of the mist, and then I thought, yep, those ARE dinosaurs! That's what they look like now. We saw lots of hooded mergansers (and mallards), and in this photo I love the view of the one from the back.

Here's another funny view of one from the back.

Here is a pair of hooded mergansers.

And once again, here's what they look like swimming away from you.

I suddenly noticed the ducks and geese (and even gulls) seemed agitated, and then I realized it was because a mature bald eagle was flying right over them. It landed in a tree near us, but it was at an angle where Travalon couldn't get a good photo. We also saw a red-headed woodpecker, but again Travalon couldn't get a photo of it. 

Then we drove to the bird party by the Tenney Locks. There were mallards sleeping on the ice.

Including this mallard hybrid they tell me is called a bibbed mallard.

We also saw lots of goldeneyes.

And a pair of the trumpeter swans were still around.

There was another swan that was asleep on the ice, but I hoped it wasn't actually in mourning for its mate, since the last time we were there, we saw two pairs of swans.

In this photo, the goldeneye furthest to the left is throwing his head back in a suave mating dance.

Here is a happy pair of goldeneyes.

The swans are enormous next to the tiny goldeneyes, which are much smaller than mallards.

Here you can see them with a pair of mallards for comparison.

We walked along the canal and saw these three mallard hybrids. The two darker ones are smaller than regular mallards (not as small as goldeneyes), but the drake on the left is average sized.

Here is a closeup of him. His coloring is just a little different than normal.

Here are the two bibbed mallards.

This is a closeup of the drake. I love his iridescent head!

Finally, we went back home and checked out the action off our dock. Here you can see a male goldeneye and a male bufflehead. The goldeneye just has a white patch on his cheek, while the bufflehead has a big white patch on his crest.

Here is the goldeneye again.

Here is the bufflehead.

These are coots. They aren't actually ducks, but they act like them. Their feet are more like chicken feet than duck feet.

Here is a pair of goldeneyes and what looks like another male goldeneye starting to dive. Goldeneyes and buffleheads are diving ducks, so they're a bit tricky to photograph.

We saw a male common merganser, but he flew away just as we arrived, and then later he flew back in the other direction. We never got a photo of him.

Travalon dropped me off at the Lutheran Cathedral of the Midwest for a Bach concert, and then I went to work on campus for the afternoon. I only saw two other people in the building, and one of them was the guy coming to pick up the package I had put in the bin to be picked up literally moments before. I was very happy about that, because I thought they picked up at ten in the morning, so I figured the package would not get mailed until tomorrow. Not that it makes that much difference; it's a book being sent via media mail, so one day will hardly make a difference in its long, slow trek to Tennessee.

Famous Hat