You can observe a lot by looking
--Yogi Berra
I stopped at Marshall's Pond today, hoping that the resident waterfowl had been moving around enough to keep some of the water open, since almost every body of water around here, including big swaths of Barnegat Bay, is frozen. And they had kept a small section ice-free. I'd like to think it's the heat they generate by swimming around as well as their body temperature, but sometimes I suspect excreta plays a role too.
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| American Wigeons amid garbage |
Of course, I was looking for year birds and Marshall's can have a good variety of ducks, but my first scan showed only geese,
Mallards, a flock (32) of
Ring-necked Ducks, and a lone
Bufflehead. Not promising. I walked to the east end, hoping that section would also have some open water, but it was iced up all the way back, so I returned to the little draw of open water. I decided to look at every duck (there weren't that many) to see if something new for the year was mixed in with the others and sure enough, I quickly found a hen
American Wigeon. Then I found a couple of others and then two more on the little garbage strewn island at the west end.
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| Northern Shovelers (hens) |
Looking around some more, I saw two smaller ducks with huge beaks float right by me--hen
Northern Shovelers. Neither of these two species are rare, but they were both what I was hoping I'd find at this shopping mall's retention pond. I was happy to have them on the list but bothered that I didn't find them sooner--like the moment I got there. It wasn't as if I had thousands of ducks to sort through and it wasn't like they were similar to anything else on the pond, and I don't have the excuse that they were diving ducks and were underwater when I first scanned. So, the lesson I repeatedly have to relearn is to actually
look at what's in front of me, instead of quickly ticking off "Mallard, ring-neck, single Bufflehead...let me look somewhere else." The Yiddish for "patience" is
sitzfleisch.
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