ML48829841

Age

Not specified

Sex

Not specified

Observation details

After seeing Rob Hewitt’s eBird post yesterday, Chris Allen and I decided to check out the swan at Mono Lake this morning. We arrived about 10am and found a swan at the end of the county park boardwalk. As it was a lone swan we ended up spending a lot of time studying it, but felt it was a Trumpeter Swan. The bill on this bird seemed very long and appeared entirely black. The top of the bill was a bit knobby, not slightly concave as in Tundra. There was a nice straight line from the inside “corner" of its bill to its eye, and the eye was well-surrounded by black, not just barely connected to the rest of the bill color by a skinny little pedicel. The most difficult feature for me to see on this bird was the V-shaped border to the forehead. To both Chris and I the border looked sort of “in between” Tundra and Trumpeter. Only at certain angles in the field could I really see the V-shape because of dirt on its head. When I downloaded my photos and zoomed into the forehead, I could see that there was dried up mud caked onto the birds forehead, obscuring the shape in the field for us.

Technical information

Model

Canon PowerShot ELPH 340 HS

Lens

4.5-54.0 mm

ISO

200

Focal length

4.5 mm

Flash

Flash did not fire, auto

f-stop

f/3.6

Shutter speed

1/400 sec

Dimensions

1383 pixels x 1139 pixels

Original file size

226.06 KB