Hooded Merganser (Lophodytes cucullatus)

Ordered Merganser – male

Hooded Merganser –  female

It is early winter and this is the time when the Hooded Mergansers start pairing up for the for the coming year's mating season.  The mergansers can be found in winter on freshwater ponds and streams, marshes and protected saltwater bays.  The males will court  the females by rising up the water spreading their white crests and making low groaning sounds.

Hooded Merganser - mating display

Just like wood ducks, hooded mergansers nest in tree cavities and will be even use wood duck boxes, if they are not occupied.

They feed by diving for fish, crayfish, and other food which they will grab in their serrated bills.

Hooded Merganser, female with fish

A great location to view and photograph the Hooded Mergansers is Town Brook Park in Plymouth, Massachusetts, site of The Jenney Grist Mill, where Jenney Pond (Ams House Pond) is located.  You are able to see the mergansers feeding and displaying.

Black (American) Scoter - (Melanitta americana)

Black scoters are not a typical bird to find in southeastern Massachusetts in the summer months.  Normally you would expect to find Black Scoters here from mid-September through early May, during their migration and wintering seasons.  During our birding trip the other day( June 28th), out on Gooseberry Neck in Westport, Massachusetts, a raft of about 13 black scoters were seen.  The raft included adult male and female, black scoters, plus a number of first-year plumage scoters.
Black scoters normally breed in the fine off of North America and Labrador, Newfoundland and into Hudson Bay.  They also do occur in Alaska.  They nest in the tundra in large clumps of grass that align with grass and down.
The male black scoters are black with no white on the wings, and has a swollen yellow or orange knob at the base of the bill.  The females are a Sunni brownish in color and have pale grayish brown feathers on the rest of the head.
They feed by diving for crustaceans and mollusks and will feed on insects and their larvae during the nesting season.
This flock of birds probably did not migrate northward in the spring and have remained here over the summer.  Searching the information on eBird for the area around Gooseberry, the flock of 13 Black scoters is the largest number that has been reported for the summer months.

By utilizing judicious slow movement, not directly toward a black Scotus sitting on a seaweed covered rock, we were able to obtain some decent photographs of the duck.


So the next time you are visiting the shore and are bird watch and, take a Full look at the ducks that are out swimming, you may be surprised at what you find

Ruddy Duck - Oxyura jamaicensis

I finally was able to photograph a duck that has been eluding my capturing its picture.  My first sighting of the Ruddy Duck was and Yellowstone National Park, but I did not obtain any photographs of it.  It is mainly a Western bird and is found on the East Coast during the winter.  In its summer plumage, the male Ruddy Duck is quite beautiful with a dock, large white cheek patches, the bill blue or bluish, and when it's in breeding plumage, the body is a cinnamon red.  It is a member of the "stiff-tailed ducks" and often holds its spiky tail straight up in display.  In the winter.  The male ducks resemble the females with a grayish-brown neck and body plumage, but still have a large white patch on the sides of their head.  This winter the ducks have been in Plymouth Harbor, and the one I found was on Spooner Pond.

Ruddy Ducks are a diving duck and they dive to feed on pond weeds, algae and the seeds of other grasses.  They also will eat aquatic insects shell fish and crustaceans.

Bird Behavior, Bathing and Photography

The fun of photographing birds at of the animals is capturing the unusual.  Partly it can be luck, but also it is understanding the behavior of the animal that you are observing and trying to photograph.  I have a large number of images of ducks and gulls swimming and walking, so lately I've been observing them in order to capture of the behavior.  One of the events that I have observed is that when birds bathing and preening, they will usually rise and spread their wings, which gives you different action and behavioral photographs.  The idea is to have patience observe and be prepared for that event.  The other day when I was down at Jenney Pond in Plymouth, Massachusetts, both Mallards and Ring-billed Gulls were preening and bathing, which led to some interesting photographs. 
In order to help people with their photography, I am going to provide some technical information on what equipment I used and what settings and further information on post processing.
I utilized a Nikon D7000, with a Sigma 300 mm f 2 .8 lens along with a Sigma 1.4 tele-converter.  Because the Nikon D7000 has a 1.5 crop sensor, my equivalent focal length was 630 mm.  I used a monopod - Monostat-RS, which I love because of its large swivel toe stabilizer that prevents involuntary movements and yet permits smooth motion, and the horizontal for photographing moving objects.

For this photograph, I wanted a partial blur.  So I had set my f-stop to f 13 and my shutter speed was 1/250 sec.  For all my photographs, I had my ISO set at 400.
For this series of pictures my f-stop was f 7 .1 and the shutter speed ranged between 1/1001/250th of a sec. For more infoation about creating blurs check out A GUIDE TO PLEASING BLURS by Arthur Morris and Denise Ippolito at http://deniseippolito.com/prints/


Mallards:

Male Mallard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ring-bill Gulls   

Post processing was done in Lightroom and with NIK software, Viveza 2 and Color Efex Pro 4, which allowed me to control the contrast, saturation and the detail in the pictures.

As I continue to look at the pictures, what I identified as mallards, except for the male Mallard.  O am thinking that the pictures are more of a Black Duck-Mallard hybrid, because of the bill color and that there is a touch of green on the ducks head