A WEEK IN WATERFOWL

One thing about living along a river—no two days are ever alike; every day you see something new, often unexpected. The past seven days has been no exception. This is just a small segment—waterfowl—of what the passing parade served up. 

If there's ever a contest for America's prettiest waterfowl, the smart money might be on the wood duck. Just look at this pair I photographed a few days ago on the Cottage Pool. Especially the spectacularly handsome male—with his red eyes, green head, orange bill, turquoise wingbar, white chin and face pattern, and that ruddy-plum lower neck and chest. Talk about a feathered dandy! And those are just the highlights you can more-or-less see in this admittedly mediocre image. The female looks almost dowdy by comparison.

Although…the trio of blue-wing teal that stopped by briefly last week were also extremely attractive. And a few days before they dropped in, I looked out and saw two pairs of common mergansers feeding and diving about the pool. Maybe not pretty on the order of teal and woodies, but still nicely marked and quite attractive.

Of course there's always a mallard or two hanging about the pool and the stretches of slower water above and below the Big Riffle, which feeds the Cottage Pool and is almost high and steep enough to be called a falls—though I can never bring myself to tout it so pompously. Mallards are the common duck here along the river, as they are in most areas—wild or suburban.

The final member of this waterfowl report of the recently spotted is another common resident, the Canada goose. The river is home to countless geese. Honking all the way, they sail up and downstream all day—sometimes above the treetops, often barely a flapping wingtip from water's surface. A couple of months back the geese began pairing up, or at least loudly reaffirming their mate choices to all the interlopers who tried to offer themselves as preferable alternatives. The discussion were loud, angry, and not lack in regular goose-style fisticuffs. 

Such procreative shenanigans have their eventual consequences in the form of eggs which, duly and faithfully sat and incubated, hatch into fuzzy goslings. The same morning the teal stopped to visit, the pair of Canadas who've been nesting on the upstream tip of the island, paddled down to proudly show off their quartet of wide-eyed youngsters. 

I made a family portrait.

And that's the week in waterfowl. 

————————      

        

TOO BUSY? NAAAHH-H-H!

Well, here it is less than a month since I began this blog, and already I’m remiss in my self-made promise to post something—even if only a few lines—daily. With Thanksgiving just around the corner, there’s been an unusual spate of grocery shopping and other holiday-related tasks to get done—and, of course, not enough time, energy, or money to accomplish everything in one fell swoop. But that’s no excuse. And neither is the fact that from well before daylight until long after dark, I’ve been working, dashing about, fretting or sulking…and at the end of it too exhausted to do more than tumble into bed somewhere close to midnight. Even today, I ate lunch standing at the kitchen counter. Yet it wouldn’t be honest to claim I wrote nothing because there was nothing of interest to report. The world beyond the windowpane didn’t pack up and leave town for the weekend. The past few days might have been unusually harried, but the lack of material more accurately reflects on my failure to observe—and really, to simply see what was always before my eyes, in plain sight, had I taken time to look. Instead, I got caught up in the mundane to the point of being unaware of, and therefore unresponsive to, the world around me. I certainly couldn’t have asked for more varied weather, since the past few days have given us a bit of everything here along the river. Snow one day—though nothing ever actually stuck for long, even when flakes came down thick and furious and the ground turned temporarily white. The following day was one of brilliant sun. Cold though, with an overnight low of 13 measly degrees…the lowest temperature of this fall-heading-to-winter. Then a day of clouds, and some wind. And finally today, which began in light rain, which became light fog and heavy overcast, before again turning back to rain. About noon, before making run to Sam’s to pick up a turkey and oysters for the dressing, I took a shot or two of the light fog—really, almost a heavy mist—upstream from the cottage. An hour later, having successfully bagged my final ingredients for Thursday’s feast and returned home—I looked out at the same upriver stretch, now without the misty fog, and saw a small flock of mallards feeding in the riffle. Fifteen in all, seven pairs plus an additional drake. Was this odd male a bachelor, widower, or just an unlucky ol’ duck who couldn’t fill his dance card and is doomed to spending the holidays alone? Or perhaps part of a waterfowl ménage à trios? Actually, mallards aren’t to common along this particular stretch of river—at least not during the three years we’ve lived here. More likely to be seen are woodies. And a male wood duck, in full feathered regalia is, in my humble opinion, one of the most astonishingly magnificent birds around. Though the first year we lived here, smack in the middle of winter when the river banks were arctic white and the pool and riffle area directly in front of the cottage was filled pale green water and rimmed with ice, six goldeneyes appeared one afternoon and hung around in the pool for the next couple of days, giving me ample opportunity to watch the three pairs, diving and feeding, for long periods at really close range. And I thought then they were perhaps even prettier than the wood ducks. We also have some semi-resident Canada geese—and several flocks of Canadas which pass over the cottage daily on the way to and from their chosen feeding areas and the shallow pond in the nearby park which they call home. I expect today's mallards might be travelers—for their behavior during the time I watched them certainly struck me as that of wild birds. I do hope they stick around a while. And I'll try and be more faithful to watching and writing...