All Is Ducky

We get a lot of great guests here at the Ridge, but for the past week, we've had some particularly neat visitors—and they've been staying in the pond!

We've had a trio of hooded mergansers paddling around: two males and a female. They've been very shy and, so, hard to get a good photo of:

Mergansers are a type of duck best known for the gorgeous white crests on the males. In profile, the plumage looks like big white mohawk hairstyles fanning out from the backs of their little black heads. They also have streaks of white on their shoulders and breasts, and they have thin black bills.

The females are a dusty brown and black, with some lighter downy brown on their heads. That's pretty typical in the bird world: the males have all the fancy feathers so that they can attract mates while females have drabber plumage, which makes for better camouflage so they can better protect their young.

As usual, we also have some geese in the pond, too. We had as many as thirty over the weekend, but today it looks like there's only about a dozen of them. The temperatures are crisp, and there's a thin crust of ice in the shaded end of the pond, but otherwise the sun is out. Apparently, if you're a waterfowl, it's a good day for a paddle!