12 November 2013. Valley Inn Hamilton ON. This afternoon I made a brief stop at a familiar pond to see what might be of interest. It’s a good site and has fueled many a My Bird of the Day post, last month’s Herons and Black-crowned Night Herons comments come to mind. On arrival I noticed a group of interesting looking waterfowl, they turned out to be a mixed bunch (male and female) of Northern Shovelers. They were living up to their name, heads down and shoveling greedily through the delicious silt. I knew right away that I’d have trouble photographing them, and so it turned out. You see their feeding technique seems to include no requirement whatsoever for breathing; just swim around, head submerged, shoveling, sifting and presumably swallowing and only momentarily looking up to see if anyone’s looking or, maybe grab a breath. My three-microseconds-too-slow reactions produced lots of really quite nice pictures of Northern Shovelers’ bodies, males and females, heads submerged. It’s a pity because taking a decent look at the birds’ spatulate bill is really kind of interesting. Nevertheless, ignoring the usually absent head and bill, the pictures of the male’s rather spiffy plumage are still reasonably impressive. Here’s a few shots, I hope you appreciate the little they show.
As an additional note, it’s turned really quite cold today. A sudden blanket of Arctic air has fallen over us and with air temperatures around just one or two degrees Celsius, it doesn’t take very much of a wind to become quite profoundly chilled. I had a new pair of gloves in the car, which I thought would be just the ticket in these airs. They’re kind of an outdoorsy grey knit and fit quite nicely encompassing my hands in a generous and general sense and reaching well up my wrists, what’s tricky about the gloves is that they are sans fingertips; deliberately. I bought them because I thought that uncovered fingertips would be warm as long as the rest of my hands were warm. Experience tells us that overall warmth is sometimes less a matter of total coverage than it is of strategic protection; down vests and hats are good examples of this. Well, finger-tip-less gloves don’t seem to work that way, I got quite mixed messages; my hands were generally quite snug while my fingertips felt as if they were naked in ice water, and quite likely to flash-freeze, blacken and fall off. Just a word to the wise.
Anyway the Northern Shovelers were birds of the day, not that I spent much time looking any further.