Duck! Duck! (No Goose)

 

Yesterday Tiffy was busy, so after Mass I went to the Care for Creation meeting. It's so wonderful to meet with people who are the kind of Catholics I remember from childhood, at a school run by Franciscan sisters. Care for nature, care for the poor, care for our beautiful planet. Travalon went antiquing, then after the meeting we had lunch at Dairyland and then spent the afternoon at Patrick Marsh, birdwatching. At band practice we had a new person come, and she works right near Hardingfele and me, so Hardingfele suggested we all walk together sometime. The new woman is originally from Germany, and she plays the violin, so we had three last night. Of course, I always stand willing and able to jump in on the violin...

Today I worked on campus and wore my argyle beret, and both my coworker and Seabird said they really loved the colors. It was very windy, so a beret was an excellent hat choice - anything else (other than my third eye beanie) would have gone flying off. However, it was also very sunny, so it was a bad day not to wear a hat that shaded my face. That's April for you.

Here are photos Travalon took on Saturday at Patrick Marsh while I was with Tiffy, and Sunday at Patrick Marsh with me, and also from our dock the last few days, for example this pair of wood ducks and this pair of blue-winged teals.

These are photos from Patrick Marsh. First, a male mallard.

Next, a pair of buffleheads.

Red-breasted mergansers doing their mating dance.

And some canvasbacks with their reddish brown heads.

This is a pair of red-breasted mergansers.

And this is a pair of scaups.

I think this is the female red-headed duck.

And here she is with the male.

Here is a pair of common mergansers.

And another male red-breasted merganser.

Here are some ruddy ducks.

This male blue-winged teal was on the small pond near the lake.

Here you can see the blue bill of the ruddy ducks.

More red-breasted mergansers.

There was a flock of cormorants on the other side of the lake.

Then we saw a pair of wood ducks. The male is so colorful, and the female has cute eyes.

And here is the pair of red-headed ducks again.

The wood ducks: the male, and then the female.

And the red-headed ducks again.

More red-breasted mergansers.

The male red-headed duck with a Bonaparte's gull.

A male red-headed merganser.

And this was a flock of canvasbacks.

Here they are facing down a horned grebe.

Back at our dock, we saw our old buddy Tux Duck.

Do you still have some time for DuoLingo bragging?

Tomorrow, if I have nothing exciting to blog about, I'll post a bunch of screenshots of the weird messages DuoLingo gives me when I do well in a lesson. Of course my favorite was: "You're a precious freshwater pearl!" but did I think to make a screenshot of that? No, I did not. And of course as soon as I did think of it, I never got that message again. Sigh.

Famous Hat