Bird Snaps: Birding and Photography: Blue Bills without Blue Bills ... yet

Birding opportunities are infrequent these days. In addition to my job being very busy, Ontario's in a COVID lockdown. Needless to say, my looks at birds have been mainly limited to my backyard feeder. But I did have a one-hour visit at LaSalle Marina one morning in early February, just as we were finally starting to get cold winter temperatures. (December and January were very mild this year.) There are usually a few open patches of water at LaSalle in winter, and I was hoping there would be the morning I went looking for Ruddy Ducks.

I went to one of my usual spots at LaSalle and, sure enough, there was an open patch of water right along the shoreline. Unfortunately, there were only a few Mallards and Common Goldeneyes swimming in it. As I walked closer, though, a flurry of duck noise erupted as a flock of Ruddy Ducks launched from a spot I couldn't see further down the shoreline. I watched the flock fly around in circles as they looked for an open-water landing zone, hoping they'd find the patch right in front of me. After a few swirls around the area, they started coming down lower and aiming for my patch of water. As I carefully and quietly climbed over some rocks to position myself lower and closer, they started landing. Too bad I wasn't already in position or else I would have tried for some landing shots.

For the next hour, I had a flock of between 30 and 40 Ruddy Ducks in a relatively small space right along the shoreline. It didn't take too long for them to become comfortable with me sitting quietly on a (very cold) rock only 20 or 30 feet away from them. The lighting was not what I'd call awesome, with there being a mix of cool shade and harsh bright sun. But I'd never had Ruddy Ducks so close before, so I took advantage of the situation and fired off lots of photos.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this experience was seeing drakes in various stages of transition into breeding plumage. Yes, it would have fantastic if they were in their full, blue-billed breeding plumages, but I'm happy to photograph birds in all of their plumages. Here are some of the photos from that day:

Searching for Open Water: