Now I Am Reduced to Duck-Watching

Up to this point in my life I haven’t spent much time bird-watching. But with COVID I’ve discovered ducks and all sorts of other waterbirds.

Of course I knew about Mallards, the male with its eye-catching iridescent green head, one of the most common ducks in Vancouver. But what kind of duck is this? It turns out to be a Surf Scoter – Melanitta perspicillata. How could it be that I had never seen one of them before?On the same day I also saw this strange duck which turned out to be a Barrow’s Goldeneye duck – yet another duck that I’ve never noticed.Then just around the corner of where I live a saw a whole flotilla of these black & white Barrow’s Goldeneyes at the beach.It was difficult to find out what kind of duck these punky little redheads were. Eventually I found that this was a non-breeding male duck of the Hooded Merganser family- a family with a different physical form for not only male and female, but also non-breeding male and non-breeding female. These are American Wigeon ducks mostly waddling away from me as fast as they can – most of my shots are of their slightly out-of-focus rear ends. Having only 5X zoom on my waterproof camera is killing me. I might have to get something more appropriate if I’m going to keep up the bird-watching. This newsletter from the Ardsley Curling Club has great photos of all kinds of ducks, and also notes on their potential ability to curl. The 2020 Duck of the month have notes about their ability to social distance during a pandemic. It cracked me up (and helped to identify a one of my new-found ducks)!