Greater Scaup (female) FOY 2022
So this was a surprise bird for me today not just because it's early in the year to see a Scaup, but that it turned out to be an even better bird that I first thought. See, there are two separate species of Scaup: Greater and Lessor. And to me personally, they look VERY similar. So similar in fact that I pretty much automatically assume every Scaup I see is a Lesser –as they tend to be more common in my area. The differences between the two are so subtle I'd actually have a hard time describing them to anyone. So as I've done almost without question for years, I assumed this bird was a Lesser Scaup as well. But in cropping a couple of my photos and and enhancing them a bit, I started to question whether this one COULD be a Greater. I would rarely think of what I did next, but I decided to search ebird.org for results on Greater Scaup in the area I saw this bird and found indeed that a handful of other birders had also reported it as a Greater! So I'm pretty happy to say that I feel like I gained a little bit of new birder ID skills today. In addition I received some additional ID tips from the local birding community over facebook, which I have not been using in quite some time. I'd forgotten what a good resource that fb group can be.
Greater Scaup (female) FOY 2022
So this was a surprise bird for me today not just because it's early in the year to see a Scaup, but that it turned out to be an even better bird that I first thought. See, there are two separate species of Scaup: Greater and Lessor. And to me personally, they look VERY similar. So similar in fact that I pretty much automatically assume every Scaup I see is a Lesser –as they tend to be more common in my area. The differences between the two are so subtle I'd actually have a hard time describing them to anyone. So as I've done almost without question for years, I assumed this bird was a Lesser Scaup as well. But in cropping a couple of my photos and and enhancing them a bit, I started to question whether this one COULD be a Greater. I would rarely think of what I did next, but I decided to search ebird.org for results on Greater Scaup in the area I saw this bird and found indeed that a handful of other birders had also reported it as a Greater! So I'm pretty happy to say that I feel like I gained a little bit of new birder ID skills today. In addition I received some additional ID tips from the local birding community over facebook, which I have not been using in quite some time. I'd forgotten what a good resource that fb group can be.