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.

Wildlife Kaleidoscope

A canoe is a floating blind. You're there, but not there for the wildlife. They're much less afraid of a silent seated half-human in a little barque than they'd be of a walking whole human. You're sort of a water centaur, blending beautifully in.

I was standing on the pier at Lakeside, Ohio, when a couple of local folks started up a conversation. A cormorant flew by. The man exclaimed, "I HATE those birds!"
Really? Why?
He launched a litany about how they "clean out all the fish" and "crap all over the islands and ruin them."

Oh.
I guess you don't eat fish or crap, either? But I didn't say that.

Instead, I said, "Hmm. Lots of people say that. But they overwhelmingly eat fish that people aren't interested in. And yes, they crap a lot. Did you know they're actually small pelicans?"

At this his wife piped up. "You love pelicans!" Which was sweet and helpful of her, and it gave me a silent inward chuckle.

 I thought somebody had to stick up for the cormorant, but I knew he wasn't going to change his view of them in one conversation on a pier sticking out into Lake Erie.

Well, I, for one, like cormorants. Especially when they fly gracefully against a white pine backdrop, which is not very often. 

Eastern amberwing, Erythemis tenera.

Eastern pondhawk, E. simplicicollis. I  adore its cool slate-blue body and green face. It reminds me of a decomissioned World War II fighter jet, with the paint oxidized, sitting in some little midwestern town green, tethered and forever hovering on a tilt 10' over the clipped grass.

The snazzy Halloween pennant, Celithemis eponina. Just getting my feet wet in dragonflies. Could be wrong. Often wrong.

Eastern spiny softshell. Probably the coolest-looking turtle in Ohio. Spooky, too. I was happy to get a photo that showed its wary eye before it slipped backward into the drink.

a gorgeous little red-eared slider, the only other turtle species I saw this day. You'd think it'd be lousy with painted turtles and mud turtles, but not today.  And come to think of it I don't know that I've seen painted turtles here. Still thinking about that.

A great blue steps along a log, one of the snags I'm talking about that are in the process of falling down. Sigh. Would they could stand forever. But every time I canoe at North Bend, I work my way around more logs.

You beautiful lanky thing you. I've always loved lanky.

Two mallard drakes in eclipse plumage rest. Thank you for leaving your fabulous violet blue speculae out for me to admire. No matter what miserable molt mallards might be in, they keep that badge shining.

Collateral Wildlife

Whenever I visit zoos, I like to look for the incidental animals; the animals and birds and fish that are there because they have moved in unbidden, because a zoo is a nice place to live, even when you have a choice. I like to see how the local wildlife, native or not, exploits the zoo environment. Maybe there's a scruffy little gang of house sparrows stealing food out of a fox's dish or picking grain out of zebra dung. Maybe there's a complex of Norway rat tunnels running under the tiger's pen.

Maybe there's a cottontail rabbit, hiding under the shrubbery that screens the chimp compound.

Maybe there's a giant Canada goose, product of an aggressive stocking program and now an overabundant resident year-round throughout much of the U.S., hoping for a handout.

Maybe there's a shadow under a mallard, that shadow resolving into a huge carp.

The mallard, a native species that gladly exploits easy resources, is here because people throw food around at zoos.

The carp, a European exotic that has invaded virtually every slow-moving waterway in North America, is here because it's hoping the mallards will miss the bread people are bound to throw to them. We have come to an uneasy peace with this big, mud-plain fish. There's no getting rid of it now.
The carp beseech me for food. There's no question in my mind that they're looking right into my eyes, begging. I have lived with their gaudy cultivars, the koi, long enough to know that look. It's pretty darned effective, for a fish.

I think about the giant Asian carp, a different and even more damaging species, now trying to make a beachhead in Lake Michigan, about the frantic efforts to turn them away from this precious, as yet Asian carp-free inland sea. Lawsuits are being brought by Ohio, Minnesota and Michigan to close a Chicago lock system that will, no matter how much we shock or poison it, inevitably allow them entry into the Great Lakes. These huge fish leap en masse from the water when a boat passes by, and have killed people unfortunate enough to be hit by their giant bodies. They make deserts of lakes and rivers by vacuuming up all the plankton and collapsing the food chain. They make sure that nothing survives but Asian carp, wherever they occur. Chicago is going to have to figure out how to transport goods by land, it seems. The environmental cost of having an open passage between Illinois' Asian carp-infested waters and Lake Michigan is simply tremendous, and entirely unacceptable. I wish my state luck in bringing pressure to bear on Chicago to close the locks before it's too late. I do not want to see Lake Erie seething with Asian carp, and no one else does, too. But this is the nature of aquatic exotics: they are incorrigible, unstoppable. The least we can do is seal off the obvious points of entry. And hope there's no one stupid or sick enough to introduce them on purpose.


These are European carp, but you get the point.

A ring-billed gull also waits for a handout. Populations of this little native gull exploded with the inception of landfills and shopping centers, strip malls, fast-food places and open Dumpsters. And it's almost single-handedly cleaned out native nesting piping plovers in the Great Lakes.

Lovely bird, just doing its job.


Outside the zoo gates, a low-paid person in a dog suit shills for Petland, hoping to lure people in to buy the tragic output of puppy mills.

Sometimes I wish I could stop thinking about connections, about collateral damage. Why can't I just look at the pretty birds, the big fish, the cute puppies? Why must I see the clumsy hand of man laid so heavily on the animal kingdom wherever I look?

What's that on the Chinese Christmas light string on the Japanese birches near the Asian elephant compound?

Why, it's a ruby-crowned kinglet. A native migrant, passing through Columbus as it flees the Canadian winter and fetching up for a few days at the zoo.

Oh, I needed that. Thank you. I love flamingos and gorillas and elephants, but you're something else again. It's so good to see you here. What a silly perch for a pretty bird.

Immersed in Marshes

A shoveler glides in for a landing, bill still wet from his last dabble.

Let's face it. Here in unglaciated southeast Ohio, we're starved for marshes. There are very few marshes, almost no natural lakes, and comparatively few opportunities to watch wetland wildlife. That's not to denigrate my beloved habitat; this blog is a celebration of all it HAS. But going to North Dakota is marsh immersion, and I love it.

I bring you marsh tidbits in this post. Marsh equals nursery in pothole country. Here, a massive creche of Canada geese from several broods.
And a racing brood of little mallards, peeping for Mama.
They take to the water, where they feel more comfortable.
Their putative father? Who would know? Although I grew up on Robert McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings, with its model of mallard monogamy, it's more likely that Dad's out looking for a receptive hen than helping to tend the brood.
Overhead, snipe winnow, giving an otherworldly woo-woo-woo-woo that seems to be coming from nowhere and everywhere at once. They make the sound by channeling air from their beating wings into narrow, lanceolate outer tail feathers. They tip and tilt, side to side, and spread their tail as they tilt. The woo's occur at precisely the same time as the wings beat down. And the sound is produced. The bird straightens up, folds it tail in a normal flight position, and the sound ceases. In a magic moment, I was able to get everyone in the group on a winnowing snipe, predicting just when the sound would occur. And they understood, and it was beautiful.Everywhere, marsh wrens click and whir. Less frequently, the triple-click and burr of sedge wrens rings out.
To me, they sound like a song sparrow with a head cold--dry and raspy, as if they were about to cough.
I love the straddly poses marsh birds have to adopt in order to perch in waving sedges, reeds and rushes. Boy, sedge wrens are cute, especially when they're mad.On the bison trip, we coaxed a Virginia rail into view with a recording of his grunting song. A sora popped up briefly but wouldn't oblige. While it bugs me to lure birds in with recordings, it makes me very happy to be able to show perhaps 35 people a rail, who would otherwise remain a mystery, and, after we're gone, will continue to be one.
At least until next June, when it might be duped once again.