So, did I get anything else for World Waterfowl Day? Well, read the title.
After a couple of days with no sign of them, the two pairs of wood ducks returned again this morning, being a little more brazen than before in that they ventured much further out into the open pond than previously. However, this did not mean that they treated my presence with less suspicion. The Girlfriend was watching from upstairs as I slipped out the outer door to Walkabout Studios, and knew the exact moment that I came into view of them with the camera in hand. Their whole demeanor changes, not drastically, but distinctly, and they immediately moved back under the cover of low-hanging branches at a faster pace than they’d been maintaining before. Mind you, I was still 50 meters off and had only leaned around the corner enough to get the lens out – they’re sharp-eyed little cusses.
Later on in the day, they were straight out from the back deck, and I eased out the door while they on the opposite side of a tree, but the moment they came out into clear view again, they spotted me and headed right back for cover.
All four of them are in this shot, but you may have to look hard; clicking on it will bring up a version twice the size, though. There are a lot of vines and grasses along the pond shores, some of which will be cleared out before spring, but it isn’t accidental that they headed for this area either – they know how to screw with autofocus, and I’d tweaked the focus ring to get them this sharp, which isn’t enough.
Still, they’re in the backyard pond, and haven’t yet flown off at my presence, so we’re still at a net positive. There will be further opportunities. I’d say that I’d construct a blind, but I’d have to get into it probably before sunrise and remain silent, since there’s too much open yard to cross to get close to the pond edge, and any given location would have a vantage only of small portions of the pond – that, naturally, means that the ducks would avoid that portion thereafter. It’s a lot like meteors, which produce the best displays exactly where your camera is not aimed.
Notice too that the brilliant red eyes of the male are quite muted in this light, which is perhaps an interesting evolutionary development: the first wavelengths to scatter in our atmosphere are in the red spectrum, then yellow, which is why the indirect light in deep shade always has a blue hue. This gives very little light for the eyes to reflect. But they have that bright coloration for a reason too, and even though these four seemed to have already paired up, I’m hoping for some nice courtship displays in the spring, which will almost certainly take place in bright sunlight to show off the colors. I also expect that, should the nest box(es) become occupied, the male will draw attention away from them once the female is on the nest, and may be out in the open a little more. We’ll just have to bide our time, right?