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| Drake pintails (with a lone hen hiding in the background); just plain photogenic |
I just got back from an annual pilgrimage to extreme northern Minnesota (a very late season ice fishing trip). Seems fitting somehow that I was greeted home by an inbox full of photos of
Northern Pintails. Roy has been having some fun while I've been away. While the mercury remains stubborn in the 30s and low 40s for highs with lows often below freezing, the sun continues to gain strength and the day length continues to stretch. Compounded by the shift of daylight savings time, we're definitely in the midst of transition once again. Roy's photographs are a vivid reminder of one big payoff in the marsh that often comes on the heals of a long, tough winter: spring ducks!
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Pintails basking on what is officially the
last day of winter |
This blog entry is largely going to be a visual tribute, both to the specific waterfowl that dominates these images, but also to all the effort over the last two field seasons that have built to this explosion of life. Quite frankly, this wouldn't have been possible just a couple short years ago. The vegetation simply was not present, so as a result neither were the food options -- via seeds, tubers, stems, and associated invertebrate life.
The congregation of pintails in the image to the left and immediately below are particularly gratifying because this is the Dinky Track, the 100-acre unit that makes up our eastern-most habitat. This area was a largely sterile, almost lunar landscape when we took possession of the property. The dominate physical features were: (1) Phragmites, (2) hundreds if not thousands of massive root clumps from dead and decaying Phrag and loosestrife [still visible amidst last year's vegetation], and (3) open water with little if any vegetation beneath the surface. None of these attributes are apt to attract much less hold waterfowl -- at least in any great numbers or over any notable time period. Already that has changed.
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| More loafing pintails taking in all the sun can give them |
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| A mix of stately drakes (with the long tails) and less showy but hardly drab hens |
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| Spring pintails on the wing |
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A comparable aerial explosion out of the West Rest Pond
(second year millet with increasing stands of desirable annuals and perenials) |
P.S. I purposefully set this post to go live at 12:15PM on 3/20/18. It is now officially spring! It's also the one-year anniversary of this blog's existence -- my first post was one year ago today, 3/20/17. Man, does time fly!
