The Usual Waterfowl
By Mike • January 23, 2007 • 3 commentsI love sharing the details of my birding excursions, but don’t mind saying that writing the same species over and over has grown tedious. It’s time to streamline my bird blogging workflow by establishing some expedient shorthand for trip reports.
Although winter presents the best opportunities for spotting a diversity of waterfowl, the same handful of species makes up at least 90% of all sightings in the New York Metro area no matter what time of year it is.
Canada Goose
Mute Swan
Mallard
Though cormorants might not fit everyone’s expectation of waterfowl, I usually find them hanging around with the species above, so I’ll add the most common one to the list.
Double-crested Cormorant
When I refer to the usual waterfowl, these (along with American Black Duck) are the birds on my mind. What are your usual waterfowl?
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Hi Mike,
along the Huron River in Michigan, I usually see Mute Swan, Mallard and Canada Goose (just like NYC) but there are also always/most of the times Common and Hooded Mergansers.
We also have Great Blue Herons and one lone Great White Egret, apparently the first one to winter around Ann Arbor, which is nice, and once in a while a bunch of semi-feral Trumpeter Swans makes an appearance on the river.
We do not, however, have cormorants in winter.
Good birding! Jochen
Ditto on the Canada geese, mallards, and mute swans. We don’t normally have double crested cormorants here in winter. That’s interesting to me because Massachusetts is not that far north of NYC. I wonder where the dividing line is?
[...] At the river we had several common mergansers and a gadwall, plus some of the usual suspects. A belted kingfisher cruised along the river. One red-tailed hawk flushed from the trees in the meadow at the south end of the trail. [...]