Ring-necked Duck

The warm weather has brought a few different birds to Lake Nelson. The Ring-necked Duck appeared this morning. It tried to hang out with the hooded mergansers but they wanted nothing to do with it.

On the banks of the old Raritan

Female Common Merganser

Ring-necked Ducks

Lake Nelson is frozen so we have no wintering ducks. We took a walk on the D&R Canal in New Brunswick (off Landing Lane) and encountered a few.

Ring-necked ducks on Lake Nelson

 

While watching the ruddy duck, we saw a group of three male ring-necked ducks land on Lake Nelson. They stayed for about 30 minutes and flew off again. We thought they were lesser scaups yesterday, but the ring around the bill is present only in the ring-necked ducks. If it were up to us, they'd be called ring-billed ducks.

Female Ruddy Duck looking for some friends

We haven't been posting much recently. We were busy with our older daughter visiting us from California. The lake was frozen which cut down on the number of waterfowl we see. It's been gray and cloudy. Chris' heart grew two sizes and she put up two Christmas trees.

Anyway, Chris spotted a small duck two days back. At first, we thought it was a grebe, but when we got the binoculars, we saw it was a lone female ruddy duck. She was trying to hang out with other ducks but the mallards, ring-necked ducks, and Canade Geese snubbed her. At least our daughter got to see some of the fancy ducks, even if some were not on their best behavior.