Ducks, and so much more.

My summer is over, but my birding must continue. I no longer work at the golf-course, and so my exposure to the bird life in the area is drastically diminished. I'm now a full time college student. Between classes I walk by a pond, and there are white faced ducks in it. I haven't taken the time as of yet to look them up, I seem to be bored by ducks; but I'll take that time right now to pick up my wonderful Stokes Field Guide to Birds $17.99 well spent at your local bookstore and learn about the white faced ducks which live in the pond at my college.

After about fifteen minutes of looking at info in my field manuals I can safely say the d-d-ducks i'm d-d-dealing with are either Buffleheads, or Hooded Mergansers. I don't have class today otherwise I'd find out today, but tomorrow I'll take my binoculars with me when I go to math so that I can look. Perhaps having access to only ducks will give me an appreciation of them that I currently lack. To me they've always been, "Just ducks." or "Just geese" but they're pretty interesting if I stop to think about them. Each bird is a meal, and they fly en masse and land on frozen ponds, eventually finding warmer climate. I'd say that's a pretty flimsy description of ducks and geese at best, but I'll work with it.

One thing I miss most other than the Red-Tailed hawks, is the King-Fishers. On a doorway in the hall where my math class resides, is a poster of a king fisher, and an owl. I look at it every day and it makes me think back to the days when I observed the king fishers at the golf course.

They were always the hardest to see, because of their dark colors and my poor eyesight. Even if I could see one through my binoculars, they would still be hard to see clearly. And I could never get very close because they're skittish. Any time I'd get within 100 meters of one it would just fly away, beat wing like mad and am-scray.

I'm sad that I never got to see one of them dive for food. Never once. I did get to see one of the great blue herons on many occasion scooping eating fish, or bugs, or frogs. Every day toward the end of my summer the heron was everywhere. He was at every water trap before we could get there, and he'd be at the next one the next thing you knew.

One thing I realize I never got to exerience was 'the Beaver'. According to Jeff, the Beaver was the size of a bear, and it looked like 'a huge walking mole mound'. I never once got to see it, and I know little about beavers so I don't know when they're usually most active. Perhaps if I work there again next year I'll get to see the mammoth beaver.