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As reported by the fine folks at The Dodo , after Hurricane Katrina forced Katrina “Kasia” Perkowska to evacuate, she started bringing her pet Wood Duck , Scooter, to her mother-in-law’s nursing home in Mississippi. One enterprising New Orleans-area bird rescuer is doing just that. But that’s a whole ’nother rant.)
Common Merganser ( Mergus merganser ) photos by Larry Jordan (click to enlarge) The Common Merganser ( Mergus merganser americanus ) or Goosander ( Mergus merganser merganser ) as it’s known in Europe, is a large, cold-hardy, fish-eating duck that nests worldwide near large lakes and rivers in northern forested habitats 1.
But I was more surprised by a Cinnamon Teal — my first duck for the reservoir — accompanied by 5 Pied-billed and 6 Least Grebes , since Least Grebes , especially, tend to be solitary birds here. Northern Pintails may be our most handsome wintering duck. It yielded 88 on January 1st, 2020.)
The landscape changes too: buildings get smaller, vistas are altered, developments go up or abandoned shopping malls fall down. I chalked up similar sentiments in April when my mother emailed to tell me that there was a Ring-necked Duck on the pond. Birds Olde Homestead orioles Ring-necked Duck sandhill crane Tundra Swan'
There were, in her book, three kinds: Owls, Pigeons, and Ducks. water birds (ducks!) Most of them were pretty good in the Owl-Duck-Pigeon range, but they got bogged down when trying to make the leap from a study skin to a particular page of the field guide for, say, a blackbird or a sparrow. And that frustration was epic.
In spite of their many species (migratory Blue-winged, Green-winged, and Cinnamon Teals, Northern Shovelers and Northern Pintails, American Wigeons and Gadwalls ; as well as resident Mexican and Ruddy Ducks ), the winter ducks of Lake Cuitzeo do not present great identification challenges. Was it practicing?
Few suitable nesting trees still survive today When I visited Kerkini last month, the water was high as high as I have ever seen it, though the number of ducks and geese was low, as is usual. There were a few Mallard, and the odd Ferruginous Duck, along with Greylag Geese and Mute Swans.
We made our way from our boat’s berth out to and around the tip of Breezy Point, seeing the typical and expected ducks like Long-tailed Duck and Red-breasted Merganser. The islands have long been abandoned and now host heronries in the summer and a horde of gulls in the winter.
There are four scenic overlooks, a woodpecker viewing area, a migratory duck pond, and access to The Appalachian Trail. There are 2,037 acres to explore, including miles of abandoned logging roads and hiking trails. Sky Meadows State Park, Virginia. This 1,864-acre park is rich with avian diversity across woodlands and pastures.
As it turned out Nikomo had been all but abandoned when he was five, and was so constantly hungry that everything became a potential food source. The last time I was here, one of the kids parked himself on my lap and regarded my copy of “Birds of East Africa.”. You like birds,” he said, giving me a winning smile.
We made the executive decision to abandon that trail and try another – one which proved incredibly fruitful. Another set of sewage ponds nearby gave us an additional duck – Black-bellied Whistling Duck. At the start of this new trail we accidentally flushed a White-tailed Nightjar that was sitting on a lone pink egg.
So here’s the rest of it, complete with veering, zigzagging, and the eventual abandonment of the original topic altogether, which is what happens when you put rehabbers together in August. For non-chef readers, if there are any, turducken consists of a deboned chicken stuffed into a deboned duck, which is then stuffed into a deboned turkey.
What was worrisome, though, was a lack of ducks. Eventually we found a couple of White-winged Scoters , small numbers of Long-tailed Ducks , and not much else. The dabbling ducks disappointed too, with only Mallards , American Black Ducks , and a couple of Gadwall showing. American Black Duck … a.
Soon I find two Common Greenshanks , several Common Moorhens , some smallish dabbling ducks turning from eclipse into winter plumage – Garganeys and one, no, two Common Snipes in the same party, posing for a long time, showing those enormous beaks. The canals aren’t bad for birds, either.
Option two: abandon bird. Now, if the bird does not have an obviously curved folded wing, we don’t really need to check the length of the undertail coverst since we know we are looking at an Acrocephalus warbler. Or vice versa. And you know what? No one will be able to prove you wrong!
Old Halls Creek as a town-site was abandoned by 1954 and everybody had moved to the new site of Halls Creek where an airfield had been built in 1948. Often there are Australasian Grebes present and the varieties of ducks usually include Pink-eared Ducks , Grey Teal , Pacific Black Ducks , Wood Ducks and Hardheads.
When that isn’t possible, many raptor rehabbers keep tabs on nests and will place an abandon chick in a foster nest. The first few years for female ducks and geese are kind of practice rounds. Some rehabbers even have surrogate ducks or geese that they can raise a lone chick with and teach it to survive.
I’ve seen Yellow Warblers in the low shrubs of Western New York pastures, the river valleys of Missoula, and the trees of abandoned industrial sites in New York City. Chuk makes his quip about the Black-winged Yellow Bird; my friend Molly insists that everything is a duck, a pigeon, or an owl.
It appeared that many of the birds that we had seen on earlier visits this year had abandoned the area due to the huge expanse of water. It really can be too wet for ducks! Despite so much water there were a few Pacific Black Ducks , Grey Teal , Hardheads , Wandering Whistling-Ducks , Australasian Grebes and Eurasian Coots.
Ducks are easier prey for the Eagle. The adults move to flocks, there may be two or three of them, that hang out mostly far off shore in the larger part of the lake, abandoning their embayments or otherwise protected areas. And, every now and then one of the Loons disappears too. More alarm calling. Then one day they are gone.
The birds were right next to an old abandoned farm house, and seemed quite happy to have their photo taken, up to a point, but then like the wind, they were gone, out thru the flat desert areas of New Mexico! As I mentioned before, Lake Tucumcari is now a large dry lake bed, mostly filled in with one weed or another.
On a very quiet night during a lull in the drama of the ducks, I was researching the Greyhound racing industry, and seething over its treatment of dogs as well as the support it often gets, through subsidies, to help it survive. He started frolicking with abandon in the dried green moss at the base of Bob, our resident Spathophylum.
In modern brewing, where malt is cheaper than time and labor, the convoluted parti-gyle process has mostly been abandoned for less tricky methods and the straightforward simplicity of making one beer from one mash. In this case, Party Guy is brewed in tandem with Hermit Thrush’s Jolly Abbot, a big, barrel-aged sour barleywine.
(The phrase is also used in the Stokes Field Guide to the Birds of North America and The Shorebird Guide by O’Brien, Crossley, and Karlson, so it hasn’t been totally abandoned.). The general location of the section on Ducks, Geese, and Swans can be found in the front, in the Contents listing.
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