ML36762361
Contributor
Date
Location
- Age
- Not specified
- Sex
- Not specified
Observation details
continuing rarity first found by Brad Elvert on 9 December. Matt Wachs and I observed the bird off and on for almost 2 hours from 1450 on. Bird was first farther out in poor lighting but later was seen closer in decent lighting while it roosted on the water, foraged, preened, etc. The bird was most convincing once seen foraging and diving with Common Goldeneye straight out from the boat ramp about 150 meters off from shore. When the bird dove it was always readily picked out from the COGOs by the seemingly slightly smaller size and most noticeably by it's different head shape, which was clearly more "puffy-headed" with a much steeper forehead and taller front portion to the crown that sloped down towards the back. The bill seemed small in relation to the head and seemed to be mostly yellow. During the time that it was present closer to shore it foraged maybe about 25% of the time, roosted about 60% of the time and preened the rest of the time. At one point I saw it open it's wing and stretch and I could clearly see only 2 distinct patches of white, but I can't for sure say whether or not they were generally smaller in size to COGO wing patches. Perhaps there might have been a little pale streak along the lesser coverts but I could not see it. We left the bird around 1610 as it was sitting about the same distance away from shore as it roosted on the water. One record-quality
Technical information
- Model
- NIKON 1 V1
- Lens
- 1 NIKKOR VR 10-30mm f/3.5-5.6
- ISO
- 800
- Focal length
- 23.6 mm
- Flash
- Flash did not fire
- f-stop
- f/5.6
- Shutter speed
- 1/400 sec
- Dimensions
- 1476 pixels x 1032 pixels
- Original file size
- 624 KB