Wildlife at Home, the Wetlands and Lakeside Park

I had a much-needed return to Lakeside Park yesterday. Some free time away from work and a beautifully sunny morning took me to the far side of the lake, way off the beaten track and out into the reed beds, keeping well away from all the extra human visitors we are currently seeing at the Lakeside Park, and also as I had seen some ducks with different markings than I had ever seen before. Not ducks like our resident mallards who will come over and peck at my boots, these were more in tune with the pied-billed grebe and very wary of humans. I needed to be smart if I was going to return home with some useful photos. First up we have the common mergansers; underwater hunters with a hooked bill to help latch onto fish. Mergansers peer through the water to locate their target. And then they dive, chasing their prey. First one, two and then three out of the four mergansers came up with fish. The closest merganser appeared to have caught a large goldfish. In addi...

Another overcast morning saw my futile attempts at photographing the arctic tern hunting. I'm not sure why this is so engaging, perhaps the almost impossibility of it all in this light. I did though happen to catch a great blue heron in flight as it headed for the tree tops. There were three great blue herons at the lake this morning: It was during my apparent time-wasting with the tern that I spotted something in the middle of the lake which did not look like a mallard or a Canada goose. Here is the first photo from the seated area of Lakeside Park: I initially thought it was a grebe of which we had two this spring, the horned and pied-billed, but identifying would have to wait until I returned home. It moved further out as I tried to snap a few more photos and so I decided to move to the trail side of the lake. The light shimmered on the ripples on the lakes surface from that side: We played a game of tag over the length of the lake, back and forth, swatting...