Thursday, February 25, 2010

Hooded Mergansers

Hooded Mergansers
Hooded Mergansers are small, diving, fish-eating ducks. Here an immature male is followed by an adult female. One of these weeks I'll post a shot of the adult male, who is the real beauty of this species. See a low-resolution enlargement of this shot here.

5 comments:

Generik said...

Something about their faces just amuses me no end. Really like this shot.

Donna said...

Gorgeous shot and...I"m quite sure I used to run into these two at The Rat back in the '80s. Yup, sure of it.

E-6 said...

Crazy looking eyes on those birds! Another swell capture.

ahab said...

Thanks!

These are wild little things, both literally and figuratively. They generally hang together in a group of from eight to fifteen or twenty, and they do everything together. When they are diving and feeding, they seem to inspire one another to get into almost a frenzy of dives. They swim or fly everywhere together around the lake. And they hang out and rest and look out for each other all together. They're extremely skittish and shy and almost secretive, so getting good shots of them is a real challenge. They're pretty cool little birds. And they're gorgeous (and, yes, kinda freaky-looking) things. Wait'll you get a load of the male.

Tom Hilton said...

Great capture!