A few months ago I was able to capture some images of male Red Breasted Mergansers in flight. Since I’ve been practicing social distancing diligently there’s been additional time to go through some older files over the past number of weeks as I’ve been spending more time in my home office.
NOTE: Click on images to enlarge.
It is always a treat to photograph any bird taking flight from the surface of the water. I was fortunate to have a couple of opportunities to do so with Red Breasted Mergansers.
For several weeks in December there were large flocks of ducks near the lift bridge on Burlington Bay. Most of the birds were longtail ducks, but there were a few Red Breasted Mergansers mixed in with them from time to time.
It took some concentration to pick out the mergansers in flight. Some luck was also needed to locate birds that were not obscured by other waterfowl.
Red Breasted Mergansers are fairly common in Southern Ontario. At this location they were outnumbered by the longtail ducks by a ratio of at least 100 to 1.
I quite like the distinctive colouring of male Red Breasted Mergansers.
Most of my images were of individual Red Breasted Mergansers in-flight. I did have an opportunity to capture a small group of four birds flying together. Exercising some patience I was able to fill my frame with them and avoid wing or body clipping.
Technical Note:
Photographs were captured handheld using camera gear as noted in the EXIF data. All images were produced from RAW files using my standard process. Most photographs were cropped to 3500 pixels on the long end, then resized for web use.
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