Ducks on the Levee

On my country runs, I visit cattle. On my city runs, along the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers in Marietta, I visit waterfowl. Marietta has the best ducks.

There are many wild mallards who've settled in with the usual motley assortment of Easter ducklings, grown up and dumped along the waterfront. I always think of my dad when I see tame mallards. He loved to proclaim on the fact that the mallard was the progenitor of all domestic duck breeds (except the Muscovy, which is from the wild Central and South American species). He'd say, "But that's not really a duck. It hisses." And then he'd imitate a hissing Muscovy. That was worth seeing.

About the mallard, Dad would say, "Feed him, and he's YOUR DUCK." He thought that the mallard was somehow genetically pre-adapted for domestication. He may have had a point. You don't generally see teal and pintails strolling along levees, looking for handouts.

There are Indian runners and mixed Pekins in the group, all of them GMO mallards, actually.

The Lafayette Hotel should get with the program, get a  Lafayette Duck Wrangler  to walk them through the lobby every day. It'd be a draw. All it would take is a little corn. I shall tender my application. I will need a red footman's uniform with a double row of shiny brass buttons.

It's actually hard to get them worried enough to take flight. I don't like doing that anyway.

But it's nice to know that they can. Don't miss the violet speculum on the drake on the far left. Beautiful.

These photos were taken November 10, when Fall was having her last hurrah. Oh, how I miss the colors. I can't tell you how much I miss the blue skies and the colored leaves.

I was out a couple of days ago under our typical winter skies, and I found this Toulouse goose who obviously got with a Canada gander at some point. She had one mutty baby with her (see its dull chinstrap and grayish orange legs, its big bottom?) 

They're always with the Levee group. See the Pekin-Mallard in front of the Toulouse?

And I got to wondering if she had more than one baby, so I looked up these Nov. 10 photos and by gosh she has three! And then I fell into the blue skies and the colored leaves, and decided to share them with you.

The babies are remarkably consistent in appearance. They got most of their dad's good looks. And they can fly, unlike Mom.

When I came back through at sunset, the babies were flying off to sleep with the wild Canadas

in the middle of the river 

leaving their mother honking, lonely, back at the levee.

She swam slowly after them. 

It kind of broke my heart. But part of her has to be glad for them, that they can fly.

Duck Duck Goose... Swan!

Diving ducks are such fun to watch, the way they suddenly arc and disappear, then pop up like corks yards away. Odd as it seems, they bathe all the time. They seem to enjoy it. But they also need to bathe.

A little drake bufflehead dunks his face as two greater scaup preen and dabble.

He shuffles and lets the water into his feathers, then squeezes it out. I call buffleheads "Sea Chickadees." Only the ruddy could possibly give them competition in the Cutest Duck pageant.

He seems to enjoy his bath (here his head is completely inverted as he squeezes the water out of his breast feathers). But he also has to bathe, has to keep his feathers spotless and grease-free, for they are all that are between him and the single-digit cold, cold so stark it takes my breath away in seconds when I leave the car. It's seven degrees and he's bathing. 

A hen canvasback preens those all-important belly feathers. I'm so delighted to see this little tank out of water that I don't even notice the large cream-colored lump in the lower left of the frame.

Still diggin' the canvasback. Lots of snow drifts...

just like on the tundra...swan!! Oh hello! Your cryptic coloration was working fine! I'm delighted to see its red smile line, as well as its little yellow loral spot.

File under: what I love about birdwatching. Birding in a place like Dunkirk Harbor is just one surprise after another. It's like opening one of those stacking Russian dolls. I've little doubt I missed a lot of what was there, for there was so much there, but I surely enjoyed what I did see.

Here's the drake canvasback, his ruby eye glowing improbably in a burnt sienna face. Not sure who thought up that color scheme, but it's a fetching one. What a glorious duck, all swooping curves. Canvasback because he's as white as canvas. Which no one hardly uses any more, except in sails and better tote bags. The old names are so evocative, but we rarely think of why we use them. Will we have nylonbacks in the future?

The terra-cotta containers reflect on the water, making a lovely painting as another drake takes off.

It's such fun to shoot these ducks flying against pier, rock, smokestack, container. Compositionally, I'd have placed the heavy pier to the left, but oh well. A mallard leaves.

Look! Canadian geese! Lots of them there.

That, and seagulls. Yes. I am messing with you birders.

North Bend Magic

North Bend is my magic place. It's too shallow for power boats. Only trolling motors are allowed, and even then, you have to be darned intrepid to want to take anything bigger than a one-man canoe in its snaggy shallows. 

Just the way we like it. I coaxed Bill out for a few hours this sunny September Sunday. We took two cars, because once I get to North Bend I never want to leave.

I think I caught him relaxing. Quiet water will do that to you.

There are great blue herons around every bend.

You can see this bird just above Bill's left elbow. It's great fun to glide quietly and shoot as you go.

Gorgeous wildlife tableaux everywhere you look.

As I glide closer, a couple of geese decide the water feels safer.

I try not to bother the wildlife, try not to force them to change what they're up to. 

I like it when they feel comfortable enough around me to go on sleeping. Birds can sleep and peek at the same time. They let half their brain sleep while the other half runs the peeking eye. I'm pretty sure I can do that too.

One of the cooler things I saw this day was a leucistic crow. It had a couple of white secondaries, symmetrically placed in each wing. This patchy leucism is common enough in crows that David Sibley included it in his tour de force field guide. This is the third such crow I've seen. The first two were flying together past our tower. I figured they must have been siblings, with a mutation like that.

It's very difficult to get a photo of a crow who knows you're trying to get a photo of it. I chased him for several hundred yards.

I got a bunch, but this is the best one. Ah well. 

Just a beautiful place to drift and watch and empty your mind of all else.

A Living Building

The Lab of Ornithology appears to me to have been designed around two major aesthetic concerns. First, the trove of bird art, like that in the Fuertes library and the Fisher’s Island panel, which have been beautifully integrated into the space. A second goal was to showcase the natural wonders in the wetlands just outside, visible through huge windows all around. It’s like the biggest blind you’ve ever seen.

Though my time was limited, I was determined to take in just a bit of the gorgeous swampy bit of Sapsucker Woods immediately around the building. It’s truly another world, quiet, laced with mulched paths, swarming with birds. Canada geese were living their lives, getting it on, preening


and making a general honking ruckus. One pair has claimed ownership of a part of the path near the bird feeder, and challenges passersby in a quiet way. I saw several toddlers try to pet this bird. Not recommended.Does this goose look intelligent to you? It does to me. There's really something going on in those eyes. It hisses and intimidates people who come too close. You don’t want a bite from that bony, serrated bill. There were a couple of geese with permanently injured wings, making a good living, mates by their side, at the pond. One bird acts as an unofficial greeter, hanging out right by the entry. It's neat to see birds the second you pull into the parking lot of the Lab.

Mallards kept bombing over and dropping in, and I played at photographing them, with some pretty cool results.As a young bird painter, I devoured a book called Prairie Wings, by Edgar M. Queeney. Using the rudimentary black-and-white equipment of the time, he captured amazing photos of ducks in flight. If only I could go back in time and hand Mr. Queeney my little Digital Rebel. What fun he'd have.
A mushmouse swam by a resting hooded merganser (the white spot directly back of the rat).

A pair of common mergansers. When they hauled out on a log, I could see the bulk of their bodies. They’re like icebergs. Note the wood duck nesting boxes, which common and hooded mergansers may also use. The place is set up for birds, and the resident geese know and exploit that.

I had to chuckle when the black-capped chickadee I photographed turned out, on closer inspection, to be color-banded. This is the Lab of Ornithology, after all. Who knows what secrets these birds have revealed?

The incandescent glow of a mallard’s head. His mate hides in shadow.

I was stunned to see a big brown bat flying in daylight, dipping down to drink. I never thought my photos would be acceptable, but they aren’t bad, considering that I was focusing manually, and the bat was dipping and diving like, well, a bat. This is a really neat shot, and it's even, finally, in good focus.
I hoped he wasn’t ill; bats all over the Northeast are turning up with “white-nose syndrome,” a disease of apparently fungal origin that is killing them by the thousands, and sending them out of their hibernacula much too early. Please be well and travel safely, brown bat.
This ends my sojurn at the Lab. The "Letters from Eden" show hangs through mid-July. Please check it out if you're in the area.

Righteous Geese

Canada geese, depending on where in the country you make your home, can either be a blessing or a curse. In places where they've been introduced, like Ohio and Connecticut, they make real pests of themselves, camping out on golf courses, leaving big gooey bombs that stick perfectly in cleats; polluting reservoirs and overcrowding lawns. Poor things, they were never meant to be nonmigratory. It took the US Fish and Wildlife Service to decide to breed a whole bunch of a nonmigratory race of Canada goose (the Giant, Branta canadensis maximus) and then take it even a bit farther. They clipped their wings, and installed them on ponds all over the Midwest and Northeast, so we'd have resident geese to shoot whenever we wanted. Gee, it worked really well. Ask anybody in Connecticut.

The only problem with this elegant plan is that in the fall, hunters wind up preferentially shooting the declining migratory races that come in nice shootable flying vees, the Canada geese who are still earning an honest living, breeding way up north and migrating to the Chesapeake Bay and Gulf Coasts for the winter. Not many people shoot Giant Canadas except out of pure frustration, so they multiply like bunnies. Hey, we invited them...

The geese in Wisconsin looked to me like they belonged there. I'm not sure what race they were; they didn't look small and stubby-billed enough to be Richardson's, which breeds in Minnesota. But they were properly wary and wild, and they were breeding out where they ought to be breeding--in marshes and sloughs, instead of in people's front yards or on median strips.

I fooled around with automatic settings while shooting these strongly backlit geese, wading through a wet meadow. Oddly enough, the Night Portrait setting did best, with a nice, soft-focus touch. I guess the slightly longer exposure blurred it a bit, and picked up more detail in the birds. They are lovely birds, and so intelligent.

Take enough pictures, and weird stuff happens. This little family fled my approach, and for a moment both parents melded into a two-headed, hypervigilant bird. I feel like this at softball games, when I'm trying to watch Phoebe play and Liam mess around the outskirts at the same time.

Comedy turned to lyrical beauty as soon as the birds hit the water. They relaxed into grace, and so did I.