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Here is another in a series of posts that celebrates the beauty hidden in plain sight, the astounding in the ordinary. Our subject today is the humble Mallard. While we all love birds for their spectacular and stupefying relationship to the air, waterfowl have another element to navigate and they are equally attuned to its [...]

Around thirty miles from Missoula in the Bitterroot Valley lies the Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge. Like several of my favorite NWRs, this one was established as a haven for migratory birds, most notably waterfowl, during the bad old days when uncontrolled hunting and habitat loss had put the future of even species we now [...]

Like you, I’ve seen a lot of ducks in my life, but it wasn’t until 2006 that I first beheld the the wondrous waterfowl that I’d come to regard as my favorite duck, bar none – the White-cheeked Pintail. The White cheeked Pintail (Anas bahamensis), also known as the Bahama Pintail, is a dabbling duck that [...]

One of the most common ducks that you see in Broome are the Plumed Whistling-Ducks and they are exactly that! They have beautiful plumes and in flight they really do whistle. We often have them fly over our house and it’s an unmistakeable call. They are on the Golf Course or in the ponds at [...]

One of the sweetest subsections of the duck family has to be the sawbills, formally known as mergansers. Mergansers are a family of diving waterfowl in Merginae, the seaduck subfamily of Anatidae. Ironically, only one of these seaducks is truly a seafarer, the others favoring rivers and lakes. The name ‘merganser’ is said to have [...]

I am always intrigued by the multitude of opinions out there on various birding subjects, but lately none more than digiscoping. With all of the birding shows involved in my schedule I have the opportunity to hear many of these opinions. Often enough, I hear birders discussing digiscoping as if it were an after thought, [...]

It has been over two months since the Greater White-fronted Goose was found at Van Cortlandt Park in New York City’s northernmost borough, the Bronx. Andrew Baksh, Birding Dude, has been keeping close tabs on it during his weekly Van Cortlandt Park bird walks since, and I figured it was time that I made a [...]

Colusa National Wildlife Refuge is part of the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge Complex in California’s Central Valley. This complex consists of five national wildlife refuges (NWR) and three wildlife management areas (WMA) that comprise over 35,000 acres of wetlands and uplands. There are also two photography blinds on Sacramento NWR, one blind on Colusa NWR, and [...]

Every autumn, tens of thousands of Snow Geese arrive in California’s Sacramento Valley following their long journey from the Canadian Arctic (click on photos for full sized images). Waterfowl numbers at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge Complex may exceed two million by December, after the wetland areas of the Klamath Basin and other areas to the north become frozen. Snow and [...]

There are few things in the natural world that frighten me. I certainly do not consider myself brave or courageous in any way, but I’d like to think that walking the wilds for 30-something years now has made me aware of the dangers and the ways of avoiding them. I am cautious, I am vigilant, [...]

The Pied-billed Grebe,  a most wondrous waterfowl, perfectly exemplify the distinction between common and mundane. Podilymbus podiceps is most certainly common in my experience, able to be seen consistently across varied habitats throughout nearly all of North America and much of South America. However, this gorgeous little grebe can hardly be considered mundane. I’ve been [...]

Okay. I know at 10,000 Birds, we’re not only supposed to wow you with blog articles, but we’re also supposed show you some awesome photos. So let me get this photo of a Trumpeter Swan out of the way: That’s an up close shot, but sometimes you can see some cool things when you are [...]

On a recent visit to Cape May Point State Park in search of an elusive Purple Gallinule I did not find my quarry but I did find quite a few photogenic birds.  One of them or, rather, several of them, were Gadwall – a pile of ducklings with their mother.  I am used to seeing [...]

There are three species of waterfowl that birders in most of the eastern United States are going to encounter on almost any birding outing that includes a pond, lake, or other body of water – The Usual Waterfowl.  They are almost unavoidable in their ubiquity, able to adapt to almost any urban or suburban environment [...]

Bird blogging is a privilege, in that recounting one’s birding excursions is a lot more fun when an audience actually follows the action. I’ve always loved sharing the details of my trips, but discovered early that writing the same species over and over became dreadfully tedious. Back in 2007, I tried to streamline my bird [...]

When the American Ornithologists’ Union publishes its annual North American checklist update next month, many birders will be disappointed to see that a proposal to re-split Mexican Duck (Anas diazi) from Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) has failed. The Mexican Duck, as its name suggests, is native to Mexico and parts of the southwestern United States, and [...]

I don’t know if I am just really lucky this year or more observant but I found another oddball Ruddy Duck recently.  Instead of a leucistic female this time a male with black cheeks and small white lines beneath its eyes crossed my path.  The dark-cheeked Ruddy Duck was in the same spot as the [...]

Now that you’re acquainted with the sublime madness of manky mallards and manky muscovies, perhaps you’re ready to be initiated into the next circle of Domestic Waterfowl Hell: the ganky goose. Most of the world’s domestic geese can be traced back thousands of years to the wild Greylag Goose (Anser anser) although domestic geese were [...]

The Muscovy Duck (Cairina moschata) attracts more attention than most ducks, at least in North America. When this native of Mesoamerica and South America is spied in the wild, usually in some corner of the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, it elicits admiring oohs and ahs. When a Muscovy is seen anywhere else, the result [...]

Mallards can be dirty ducks.  Very, very, dirty ducks.  And while ducks in general are known for their hybridizing ways, none are as prolific and undiscriminating as Anas platyrhynchos.  The list of species that Mallards are known to have hybridized with is long and in some cases Mallard genes threaten to flood the gene pool [...]