Rather than post everyday sightings, I've elected to concentrate of some images of birds that were special for me. This splendid duck was a particularly rare and awesome sighting.
The male Smew’s dramatic visage earned it the name “White Merganser”. Smew is the smallest of the mergansers, a Eurasian species seen rarely as a migrant to our West Coast. It has been documented only 3 times in California. Lucky for some, this one stayed for 2 days on a pond at Soulsbyville, in the foothills of the California Sierra.
Mergellus is a monotypic genus. The Smew, M. albellus, is a cavity-nesting duck like the Bucephala ducks and the Wood Duck. One has to wonder if this rare vagrant was hatched in the tree nest of a Goldeneye or Bufflehead, having been “dumped’ their by a female Smew needing to lay her egg. The young Smew would then have stayed with the non-Smew brood and eventually followed them down the west coast along their usual route to wintering grounds. Lucky for us!
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