Common Mergansers - An Unmatched Pair

Grabbed a few shots of waterfowl on the river Saturday.  Came up with this lovely, unmatched pair of common mergansers.

The male and female look nothing alike, as far as coloring goes.  However, they do have the same basic body shape and bill shape.

The male is white, with a greenish-black head, black back feathers, and a red bill.

The female is more of an overall silver-grey with a white chin patch, rusty brown head (with crest) and a red bill.

Common mergansers are sometimes called sawbills because of their serrated beaks - the only ducks to have such a feature. Another interesting fact about them is that the females are crested, but the males are not.

They may not look like a matched set, but these two were very happy to be sailing along together, and in a relatively short time they will be building a nest and sitting on some eggs!

I've written about mergansers before, here:
 http://foundonthetrail.blogspot.com/2013/02/another-merganser.html

Another Merganser

After researching the hooded merganser I posted about yesterday, I got interested in this little enclave of waterfowl all over again.  I remembered photographing another merganser last year, and so looked up those photos.  Here is a female from last spring

The only problem was that I wasn't sure if this was a common or a red-breasted merganser.  The hens are difficult to tell apart, and my pictures were distant and murky.

In my quest to find out, I ended up at allaboutbirds.com, at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.  I end up there a lot.  They give succinct, reliable information and have nice color photos.  Here's a link to their excellent website:

http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Common_Merganser/id

I learned that the common merganser hen has a white chin patch, while the red-breasted hen does not.  Instead, she has a dark or pale chin.  Also, the common merganser has a short crest, but the red-breasted has a longer, double crest.  That's it.  Those are the two big differences.

Based on that information, I looked over my photos again.  The crest on my bird is hard to see,  but the lack of a white chin spot leads me to believe that what we have here is a female red-breasted merganser.

Hooded Merganser

My first hooded merganser!

I was on the river photographing bald eagles when this fellow flew in and landed on the water.  He was there for a few seconds, and then, taking in the number of voracious photographers lining the boardwalk, he took off again for calmer waters.  But what a looker!  I was almost more excited about him than the eagles.

I'm not an expert on ducks, so at first I thought it was a bufflehead.  They have big white wedges on their heads, and that's what popped into my mind.  Then I heard the other photographers talking about it, and they said it was a merganser.  I came home and checked out my field guides, and of course they were right.

There are three basic types of mergansers:  the common merganser, the red-breasted merganser, and the hooded merganser.  The hooded is the smallest of the three, and the males have the white, fan-shaped patch on their head.  They begin pairing up in early winter, so he may have been on the lookout for some lady mergansers.

The name merganser, from Latin, indicates a duck-like, diving water bird.