The autumn spectacle
November 13th, 2009
Male (right) and female Green-Winged Teal, wallpaper available
Andrew Haydon is birder mecca these days. 'Tis the season and the place for migrant waterfowl. One of the manmade ponds has attracted several dozen Scaup and a handful of Green-Winged Teal, and they, in turn, attract the folks with the multi-thousand-dollar lenses. Go down there on any good sunny morning, and you can see them lined up on the shore with their tripods and their insanely well-endowed cameras. And you might just see me and my humble Nikon D40 + 70-300mm lined up with them. These ducks are normally quite wild species, whom you wouldn't expect to mill peaceably around on a little pond in a recreational park. But there they are. So we don't waste the opportunity!
Scaup males are late going into eclipse and late coming out of it. They're handsome ducks in breeding plumage, but right now they look more or less like scaup females: which is to say, like balls of mud. Some of them have begun their molt out of eclipse, which means smudgy, unkempt balls of mud. Nevertheless, Every Bird Deserves Its Day. So I took pictures. And darned if they didn't manage to look handsome in spite of themselves.
More compelling for me were the teal. Teal are small dabbling ducks with striking, often beautiful plumage. Two species occur in our area, Blue-Winged and Green-Winged. Green-Winged is the prettier of the two!
1680x1050 wallpaper
It was hard to fully appreciate them while I was focused on taking pictures, so I came back the next day with binoculars. They were still there, and I got my fill, watching them dabble in the mud from ten feet away. After awhile a photographer in full camouflage (overkill in this case) with what looked like a 400mm joined me. "I'm not used to this," he said. "Wildlife not being...well, wild."
He glanced over at the multi-thousand-dollar-lens people. "Suddenly I feel inadequate."
"I know the feeling," I replied. "My friends joke that I have a lens as long as their arm. No. That's as long as your arm."
Back on the Rideau, my winter friends, the Common Goldeneyes, have arrived in force! There were literally hundreds of them Wednesday morning, gathered in rafts all along the river from Hurdman to Cummings Bridge. Here's a small group of males at sunrise.
November 13th, 2009
Male (right) and female Green-Winged Teal, wallpaper available
Andrew Haydon is birder mecca these days. 'Tis the season and the place for migrant waterfowl. One of the manmade ponds has attracted several dozen Scaup and a handful of Green-Winged Teal, and they, in turn, attract the folks with the multi-thousand-dollar lenses. Go down there on any good sunny morning, and you can see them lined up on the shore with their tripods and their insanely well-endowed cameras. And you might just see me and my humble Nikon D40 + 70-300mm lined up with them. These ducks are normally quite wild species, whom you wouldn't expect to mill peaceably around on a little pond in a recreational park. But there they are. So we don't waste the opportunity!
Scaup males are late going into eclipse and late coming out of it. They're handsome ducks in breeding plumage, but right now they look more or less like scaup females: which is to say, like balls of mud. Some of them have begun their molt out of eclipse, which means smudgy, unkempt balls of mud. Nevertheless, Every Bird Deserves Its Day. So I took pictures. And darned if they didn't manage to look handsome in spite of themselves.
More compelling for me were the teal. Teal are small dabbling ducks with striking, often beautiful plumage. Two species occur in our area, Blue-Winged and Green-Winged. Green-Winged is the prettier of the two!
1680x1050 wallpaper
It was hard to fully appreciate them while I was focused on taking pictures, so I came back the next day with binoculars. They were still there, and I got my fill, watching them dabble in the mud from ten feet away. After awhile a photographer in full camouflage (overkill in this case) with what looked like a 400mm joined me. "I'm not used to this," he said. "Wildlife not being...well, wild."
He glanced over at the multi-thousand-dollar-lens people. "Suddenly I feel inadequate."
"I know the feeling," I replied. "My friends joke that I have a lens as long as their arm. No. That's as long as your arm."
Back on the Rideau, my winter friends, the Common Goldeneyes, have arrived in force! There were literally hundreds of them Wednesday morning, gathered in rafts all along the river from Hurdman to Cummings Bridge. Here's a small group of males at sunrise.
| ← | → |