Thursday, January 03, 2013

New Birds in Town!

We live on a little man made lake.  It's pretty.  I love living 'on the water' if you will, even though it does not in any way feed into the Ocean or the Bay, I still love it.  Peaceful.  With it comes all kinds of birds.  When we first moved in, we were inundated with Canadian Geese.  I thought it was so cool, until they starting POOPING everywhere.  Green logs all over the place and soon the love affair with the geese was turning into a nightmare.  We couldn't play in the yard without fear of stepping in goose poop.  And they are not exactly friendly.  Not mean, but menacing..  We eventually built a fence on the backline of our property and the geese never figured out that they could 'fly' over it to get to our yard to graze.  Silly Goose.  :)

After a while, we caught on to their patterns and knew when to expect the arrivals and departures of the geese.  I started noticing other birds like egrets.  They've been here for a while.  Beautiful, graceful, quiet and stilling birds.  Sometimes it seems they will stand still forever and not move a muscle.  Then Blue Herons entered into the mix.  They are more fleeting.  More prone to just taking off and flying for any little sound or change in environment is my sense.  Ducks always intermingled off and on throughout the year.  Just common ducks it seemed.

Now suddenly we have Loons and wait for it....this totally completely new bird has arrived at the lake and rocked my little world.  Gorgeous.  Black and big white patch on its head.  A Bufflehead Duck?  Maybe.... but after much research and a little help from my online friends, it has been determined that we now have Hooded Mergansers!  They are a type of duck and quite distinctive; both in their looks and sounds.
This is a Hooded Merganser in our own little lake!  

He is a male.  And he makes this throaty little banjo string low twangy sound.  Apparantly he does that when he's preparing to mate.  Well I heard that a LOT yesterday morning when walking the puppy.  Then today, I saw another and they were in a pair.  You KNOW I had the camera at the ready.  

The one on the left is a female and of course the more handsome black and white one is the male. 

 Well, I wonder if they will stay?  I wonder if they will have babies here and stay?  I think they are just so pretty.  And apparently they spend a lot of time under water feeding on crayfish and other fish found in freshwater lakes.  Love these things.

I will keep this updated with what I continue to see, whether or not they stay or go.  I hope they stay!  With so many types of waterfowl in the lake now, its beginning to represent a little bird village in a way.  Like it!

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