Goldeneyes, Scaup and Industrial Grit

I spent a couple of days recently in New York, one of my objectives being to do some winter birding. Not surprisingly, Lake Erie was frozen solid. It's a shallow lake, and it freezes pretty quickly. In a winter like this, everything seems to have frozen over. Me included.

Ice several feet thick puts an unequivocal damper on lakeshore birding. There was nothing around for miles and miles. A quick search of eBird, though, revealed that there were some interesting things happening around Dunkirk Harbor. Only a warm-water outlet could explain that. I made my way along the jumbled frozen lakefront toward three tall stacks belching smoke and steam. That was where the birds would be.

And sure enough, a coal-fired power plant was warming the water sufficiently to open part of it to fish, ducks, and gulls. Local birders I spoke with said that the plant was operating at only a fraction of capacity, and that there's normally much  more open water than I saw. Never having been here, I was all agog.

 

A pair of mallards flies past containers in the harbor, the male's green head glowing Kryptonite. 

Common goldeneye drakes were feeling frisky despite the extreme cold (it was about 7 degrees, with a wind chill of I don't want to know). These two are performing head throws, which nicely spotlight their shining white cheek discs. To the right is a drake greater scaup.

More greater scaup, a drake (top) and two hens. See how the white stripe goes down into the primary wing feathers, almost to the tip? Lesser scaup have white only in the secondaries, so only the inner half of the wing has white. Here's a hen lesser scaup from last winter's Virginia trip. Half a wing stripe. It's obvious in flight, and it's the easiest way to tell them apart at a glance.

Here's a close view of a drake greater scaup (white-winged scoter in back!)  The unequivocal green gloss on its smooth round head is a good field mark for this species. Lesser scaup are more delicate, with thinner, longer-looking necks. Instead of being smoothly rounded, their heads are peaked like Daffy Duck's, with a purple sheen. The sleeping brown duck in the foreground is a female greater scaup.

Even closer. The greater scaup has a broad blue bill, with a large black "nail" on its tip. Lesser scaup's bill is narrower, and the nail is smaller. These may seem subjective, but when you've got a greater scaup, you just know it. 

I love this image of greater scaup scudding by smokestacks. Dunkirk Harbor is a gritty place, and the burgeoning bird life is a sharp contrast to aging stacks, container ships, and the piles of coal around the old power plant. 

The scaup floated in vast rafts, along with thousands of common mergansers, mixed flocks of red-breasted and hooded mergansers, canvasback, redheads, goldeneye, bufflehead, and white-winged scoters.

 

All around swirled thousands upon thousands of gulls, mostly herring and great black-backed. 

In the warmed waters of the harbor, the triangular dorsal fins of thousands of shad roiled and tossed. I'm not sure what was going on, but it was a shad event to be sure. 

And wherever thousands of any life form gather closely together, death follows. Dead shad floated all around. The gulls hauled them up onto the ice to carve them up.

It was a macabre cafe, a gull cafeteria. Nearly every bird had its own frozen fish to pick at. The gulls were doing very well here, reaping the abundance of death. 

And under the piers, the buffleheads slept with Brother Canvasback*.

*thanks to Hap in Minnesota and Bottomland Mud for chimping me! 

Coot Ballet

You never know when nature will present you with something amazing. Sometimes it's hidden in the seemingly mundane.  On Saturday, January 19, a group of us carpooled to Back Bay NWR near Norfolk, Virginia, for a field trip for The Virginia Beach Winter Wildlife Festival. 

Now, though I grew up in Richmond, I had never come back to Virginia on a real live birding field trip. Odd but true. I never realized people other than me went out looking for birds--together--until I went to college. I was thunderstruck that there was such a thing as social birdwatching. And I took to it like a coot to water.

gotta love this hat!

So we're tooling around the frozen impoundments at Back Bay with a freezing wind whipping through the open tram in which we're riding. I'm sitting next to my new friend Susan and her sister Annie and we're having a grand old time sharing an afghan. I'm shooting out the side of the tram.

Ring-necked duck and hen bufflehead take to the air.

A hen ruddy duck does, too. Her reflection is sharper than she is!

The famed tundra swans of Back Bay are consorting with a drift of snow geese, quite some ways away. The geese are in the foreground, but all the long straight necks you're seeing are swans.

Everywhere, we could hear the mellow hooting of the swans above the gabble of snow geese.
That beautiful sound took me right back to my first visit to Minneapolis when I was twelve years old, the first time I heard it. Skeins were going over downtown. I looked up when I heard their calls and there they were, the first wild swans I'd ever seen. I lit out down the crowded sidewalk, grabbing people's arms and pointing up. "Swans! Wild swans!! LOOK!!"

That was surely an epiphany for me. Not just seeing the swans, but finding myself absolutely compelled to get others to see and appreciate them, too.

Still at it, as you see. 

A rather forlorn sight: a flock of white ibis moping in snowy branches. I think they're rushing their push northward. There weren't any white ibis in coastal Virginia when I was a kid! You poor things should be in Florida or Georgia. Somewhere warmer than 20 degrees.

Find the forest fairy in this photo.
Might need to click on it to get a larger version.

but about that amazing thing I mentioned...

We're tooling along and there's a big flock of coots in a roadside ditch that somehow has remained open through the deep freeze. There were the usual disparaging remarks about the ordinariness of coots. But I was on fire. I like coots and I especially like coots in motion. These ungainly aquatic rails with their petal-lobed toes do a lot for me. Especially when they run.

As the coots pattered over the water and ice, I spotted a pied-billed grebe amongst them. "Grebe in flight! Grebe in flight!" I hissed to the group. Because you just do not get to see pied-billed grebes fly. Ever.
He's at the back, center. Look at that. Not to mention the fabulous thundering herd of coots.

My parting shot--grebe ballet. 

O beautiful.

My sincere thanks to the Virginia Beach Winter Wildlife Festival for having me down. I had a blast from start to finish. Check it out next January. Terrific people, great birding, all kinds of fun. Do it!

Beach Buffleheads

It's rare to have buffleheads close to the beach. 

I went straight from the cooperative sanderling to a pair of buffleheads. The drake, unbelievably clean-cut in black, white, cobalt violet and viridian. Oh, let me run  my hands over your satin head, please. If I can't do that, I would love to take your picture.

You may. But I would like to have my wife in the next one. I am married, you know. Even though your offer is enticing.

Oh beautiful buffleheads, diving for mussels and clams, picking them off the rocks below, grinding them in your gizzards. Thank you for swimming in close.

They bob like toys on the gentle waves, disappearing from view and bobbing up again, and dive in synchrony.

The waves lap at my boots as I strain to get closer, but they drift out to sea. Time's up.

A drift of ruddy turnstones shuffles onto the rocks. Having kept one for several weeks until it recovered from a bacterial infection, I adore turnstones. 

They're busy, friendly little birds. I used to hide his chicken gizzard bits under large stones. Gave him something to do, I did. He used to put his shoulder to the bigger ones. Oof! and he'd turn them over.

 One stops to preen.

 His orange feet, a study in weight distribution.

We find a live whelk on the beach and decide to leave him until the tide comes back in. He's got water. He might know exactly where he is and wish to stay there. Whelk wishes. Respect them. 

Finally, two purple sandpipers fly in. Our quest bird, speaking strictly for the others. I was perfectly happy with the turnstones, the sanderling and the whelk. And the buffleheads.

But oh, he's beautiful, with a sateen sheen that, if you use your imagination, might have some violet in it.

Back home, Phoebe cuddles Chet

and the snow settles on lawn chairs.

and I miss them, but I am so happy to be on a sunny beach in Georgia.