Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
I love watching the diving ducks on Horse Lake, like this female scaup starting her dive to search for food under the water. She pushes forward with her flattened tail on the surface of the water and her webbed feet below and breaks the surface of the water with her beak, her body soon to follow. It’s absolute poetry and I’ll never tire of watching it.
This is the tail end (literally) of a female lesser scaup diving head first under the water, water spilling off of her flattened tail in the back and splashing away in front from where her beak broke the surface tension of the water.
Even when not in their prettiest plumage, shovelers are fun to watch.
Male shovelers transition through several different plumages in a year. According to my Sibley guide, this male’s plumage would typically be on display during the summer, but I took this picture on Christmas day. The males have lovely green heads in their breeding plumage, but in this look resemble the females in many ways.
A juvenile great blue heron hunts for voles in a meadow on a Christmas afternoon. The direct light of the setting sun was now blocked by the distant hills so I took a few pictures in the fading light before heading for home. I had photographed this heron before and spent about 15 minutes with it on this occasion, so it felt comfortable enough to turn its back to me even at such a close distance.
A juvenile great blue heron hunts in the last throes of direct sunlight on a Christmas afternoon.
A dark-eyed junco visits the dogwood next to the bird feeders in our backyard. She is a female of the Oregon race.
Visit Ridgefield during the winter and nearly every body of water will have American coots on it. I spent a good deal of time this past winter photographing coots at Horse Lake, a seasonal pond at the start of the auto tour, trying to capture different aspects of their lives, such as how American wigeon will dash over to eat the plants a coot has worked loose from the lake bed.
The wigeon will swim over after a coot dives and try to eat what it brings up when it surfaces. Many times it seems to me they spend more energy chasing after the coots than if they had just dabbled in the shallow water to feed themselves. Other ducks like gadwall also participate in this thievery – as do other coots as well – but the wigeon are relentless. For their part, the coots put up with it without much fuss. Here, a male and female pair come at the coot from each side.
Sometimes I like to just sit beside the cattails at the edge of South Quigley Lake and wait. Most of the time nothing will happen, but sometimes a bittern or rail or, as in this case, a sora will pass silently by.
I got a brief glimpse of a Virginia rail leading its chicks through the grasses at the edge of Rest Lake the other day, but they were so well obscured that I heard more than saw them. On this day back in 2011, however, I got a nice close (albeit brief) look at an adult.
Boolie 