Birding has become more comfortable and enjoyable, now that the weather is co-operating. The skies are filled with the wild gabble of migrating geese, and other birds can be heard getting in some vocal practice before the main events of courtship and mating get started in earnest. In our bilingual country, even the birds are working at learning a second language. Over the past couple of weeks, I have heard magpies, nuthatches, and red-tailed hawks, but in each case the caller was a blue jay! I know this, because I followed the sounds and discovered the jay sitting on a branch with his beak moving when the call was heard. He almost seemed to be enjoying my confusion!

Birders are spreading out all over the country, busy using their Christmas gifts and new equipment to see what is around them. The forums on the internet are very busy, with new sightings and nesting reports moving northward by the hour. Communication between birders has never been so easy or so widespread. One can read reports from all over the world, from Australia to Northern Canada, all excited about what the reporter is seeing.

When the lakes open up, there will be lots of ducks to study. May I suggest some birds to watch for? The Mergansers, Common, Red-breasted, and Hooded are very interesting. These ducks are different from others, in that they have a long narrow beak with serrated edges. The beaks are very good at holding slippery, wiggly objects like little fish. These are diving ducks, and they make their living going under water to catch fish. They look long and low on the water, and as they are divers, they must patter along the water to take off. They look like an aircraft roaring along the runway in order to gain flying speed. In flight, they hold the beak, head, body and tail, all in the same horizontal axis.

The mergansers share an interesting facet in their looks. All of the females look as if they are having a permanent "Bad Hair Day"! One could say a bad case of bed hair, but they don't use beds. The male Red-breasted shares this look, but his "hair" is green, rather than the rusty red of the females of all merganser species. The Common male also has a green head, but his coiffure seems to be under control. The Common Merganser is found throughout North America, and also in Europe and Asia, where it is called the "Goosander". The Red-breasted male has a reddish breast, with a neat white collar around his throat. The Hooded male has a black head, with a white horizontal streak behind the eye. When he is excited, he raises the feathers at the back of the head, opening the streak to a quarter circle patch of white.

I remember an interesting encounter with a female Common Merganser. This bird was reported to Fish and Wildlife as being injured, so a Wildlife Technician and I went to have look at her. We saw that she could not swim properly, so we captured her. She had a fishhook in her foot, and the line was wrapped around her other leg. She didn't struggle too fiercely while we were removing the hook from her foot, and getting all the line off her leg, but when we were finished, she decided that she wanted nothing more to do with us! I was busy trying to control that long sharp beak, and she was just as busy trying to stab any part of either of us that was in her reach. Finally, we decided that we had found all of her problems, and chucked her out of the boat. I don't know who was more relieved, the patient or the "Emergency Medical Team"! She swam strongly away, and it might have been fun to be able to speak Merganser, so we could understand what she was saying.