This morning we had two visitors to our local pond, a pair of Muscovy ducks. Wonder if they will stay long. The trio of nameless ducks ignored their visitors.
(I’m actually just testing the WordPress app on my iPhone.)
Tag Archives: bird
Males or Females?
Mottled Duck
Juvenile Male?
My birder friends, Kirsten and Celia, think the mottled bird in the pond is a female since most female ducks have mottled coloring. Since there was no adult male duck around, I had started to think that the bird was a male, possibly a mottled duck ((Anas fulvigula), but comparing it to the diagram of a mottled duck in my Peterson’s Eastern Bird book, I now realize its face is too dark and the light color in the tail is too light. Probably Kirsten and Celia are correct that it is a female of some sort. They think the two pale ducks (see Nameless Ducks) might both be junvenile males, but they couldn’t come up with a possible identification for them either. Although one of the ducks has a tuft of feathers on his head and is much darker than the other, their coloration is similar and both have two curled up feathers on their back, so they must be the same species. I’ll keep watching for further clues to see if I can determine what they are and who they are.
Anhinga
I carried my Canon camera with me this morning when Max and I walked, and I managed to get two new photos of the Anhinga birds on the nearby ponds. The male was sitting as usual in his tree by his pond, and the female was sitting as usual on the side of her pond. She had obviously already been fishing since she was drying her wings. She seems to have developed a few new feathers on the back of her head since September and she seems to be a little darker on the back of her neck. I thought for a while that she might be a juvenile male, but she has identical coloration to a photo on the iBird South app on my iPhone that is labeled female Anhinga, so that settles that.
Anhinga Male
Anhinga Female
