December 2017
Salish Sea, Pacific Northwest
I’ve been playing around with video recently now I’ve found the button on my camera. Still have a lonnnnggggg way to go skill-wise (still working on keeping it steady, in focus and with critters in view), but it’s been fun to capture some wildlife behaviors in motion.
The Daily Bucket is a nature refuge.
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Ducks are a natural focus these days: abundant, here for the winter from their freshwater rivers and lakes up north where they breed. They’re also constantly busy, mostly feeding, but also grooming, drinking, and generally sorting out their social situation. Most ducks hang out in flocks.
These are some short videos I’ve taken recently from the beach.
Buffies
In the video we see a typical flock gathering near the shore at dusk. Buffleheads aka Spirit Ducks spend the night in very shallow water in a tight group. As night falls and they get sorted out there’s a certain amount of tussling going on.
Drakes are mostly white, hens are mostly black.
This is next video starts out with a big jerk — sorry! lost my balance — but then shows a group of buffies hunting in the last of the sunlight for crustaceans and clams along the bottom, about 4-6 feet deep. One utterly charming quality of buffies is how they bob up to the surface. They are extremely buoyant.
A still photo, a classic buffie moment, as night falls:
Red-breasted Mergansers
Unlike buffies, mergansers usually hunt by swimming along with their head underwater scoping out prey. Then they’ll dive for it. These mergansers feed on small fish mostly but will also catch crabs and shrimp and suchlike.
These are all hens &/or first-winter youngsters.
Bonus: Can you identify the bird calling in the background?
Mergansers also groom, chat and snooze, as we see in this still photo:
American Wigeons
There’s a big flock of wigeons that lives in the bay next to the Anacortes ferry dock. They show up in the fall and spend all winter munching on the drifts of sea lettuce that wash up on the beach. Wigeons have the most delightful conversational tone, and interact with each other in a pretty friendly way. Ferry passengers frequently walk down along this beach while waiting for their boat; the wigeons just move out into the water when a person or dog goes by, and then come back to munch some more. Or drink fresh water running into the bay from a wetland behind the beach. Which they are doing in this video.
The drakes have white on their head and butt, the hens do not.
Listen to their squeaky little voices!
And here they are munching on sea lettuce both on the beach and floating offshore.
(We can hear the WashStateFerries PA announcements down on the beach. The fragment in the video is announcing a boat to a different island; my boat isn’t for another 50 minutes).
I hope you can play the videos and enjoy the ducks.
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Time for your reports of nature from your neighborhood.
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