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South Platte Bird Life

This afternoon, we headed out to do some birding along the South Platte River. In one of the nearby ponds, we found a mating pair of Mallards.

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Mallard, Mating Pair.

While making some images, the female Mallard started flapping her wings. I was fortunate to capture a few images. In this image, we can see the purple speculum, which is a distinctive feature of Mallards.

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Female Mallard, Flapping Wings.

When we arrived at the river, a pair of Common Mergansers were swimming up stream. Later we found the pair on one of the rock, busy preening themselves. This is one if the images that I captured.

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Common Merganser, Mating Pair.

The male had long since finished preening himself. The female had been preening for some 15 minutes.

A female Mallard was swimming past the rock. The male Merganser seemed to say “Stay Away From Our Rock” to the Mallard.

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Stay Away From Our Rock

One of the many bikers had walked down to the river. I captured this image of his reflection in the water

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Biker Reflection.

Angela called out that a Cormorant was in flight. This was the only image that I managed to capture, after the bird had flown past me.

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Cormorant, In Flight.

We only saw one Canada Goose along this stretch of the river.

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Just This One Canada Goose.

Heading back to the truck, we passed the pair of Mergansers. By now they had split off onto two separate rocks. The male had moved to an adjacent rock.

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Common Mergansers, On Separate Rocks.

The mail may have moved to the adjacent rock to get away from the shaking of the rock caused by the vigorous preening of the female!!!

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