Down at the pond, we had a rare calm sunny day of winter.

On today’s visit there was a new kind of waterfowl. My phone camera doesn’t capture bird pictures. But of course the Cornell Bird Lab comes through instead. Here is their page with video and photos of Ring-Necked Ducks ready to be admired.

https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Ring-necked_Duck/id

Today there were several Ring-Necked males, striking and glam in their sharp dark & white suits, blue and white striped bills, and rich violet plumage tones.

A gentleman with a large old-fashioned camera was patiently standing and angling about for just the right shot of this or that bird. He identified the species, and could see that these ducks were a new wonder for me. So he surprised me by bringing them up close! He made a clear chirping call, and swung his forearm up and down. In a flash every duck in the pond headed straight toward him as if they knew who he was. They all assembled at the base of our footbridge, looking up with interest.

“My goodness!” I exclaimed. “Do they think that we are going to feed them?”

“No,” he said. “They have their own food. They are only curious and bored.”

Then I asked him “Is that a blue heron up in that nest already? How wonderful!” In this picture above, in the very tippy-top left corner, there is a tousled heron nest with tousled heron, and a crow sitting just to the left.

“Yes, that is a heron.” He tactfully let me know that the heron family didn’t stand a chance. “In a successful rookery you’ll have a hundred nests, not only one; then the whole flock will stand watch and defend the others. See that crow just to the left? He’ll get any eggs as soon as the parents leave the nests. Every year that same pair nest right there, but there’s no next generation to build beside them next year. They haven’t figured out that safety comes in numbers.”

A good lesson to remember. Not only for birds.