Saturday, February 9, 2013

Beautiful Morning at the Channel


Occasional sunlight illuminated the ice-coated trees at the Muskegon Channel this morning bringing out almost as many photographers as ducks.  Most of the channel was coated with an ice scum so the ducks were pocketed in the few open water areas.  None of note except a male and female White-winged Scoter and two male Long-tailed Ducks east of the Coast Guard station.  Occasionally a swell of water would crack the ice scum sounding remarkably like the thunder-pumping of an American Bittern.

- Ric



Muskegon Channel, Muskegon, US-MI
Feb 9, 2013 9:40 AM - 10:30 AM
Comments:  Beautiful Cold Tree-Iced Morning

11 species
Mute Swan (Cygnus olor)  2
Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos)  X
Canvasback (Aythya valisineria)  X
Redhead (Aythya americana)  X
Greater Scaup (Aythya marila)  X
White-winged Scoter (Melanitta fusca)  2
Long-tailed Duck (Clangula hyemalis)  2
Bufflehead (Bucephala albeola)  1
Common Goldeneye (Bucephala clangula)  X
Common Merganser (Mergus merganser)  X
Red-breasted Merganser (Mergus serrator)  X

This report was generated automatically by eBird v3 (http://ebird.org)

2 comments:

Travis Dewys said...

Ric,
That first picture is gorgeous. Nice capture.

Ric said...

Thanks. The photographer in me wanted to keep waiting for the sun to "paint" things, but the birder wanted to put down the camera and pull up the binoculars. It was COLD doing that, so further images weren't captured. ;-/