Hi Tweets -

Yesterday I went down to the new Kent Ponds (which I found locked despite it
being 10:00 a.m. Friday, when they are supposed to open). So while waiting,
I went down to Lake Fenwick a few miles south. Nothing too exciting there
until my eye hit upon a very unusual looking drake!

At first glance, it looked like a Mallard. However, the rest of its
ancestry was clearly Pintail.

The head was green like a Mallard, but was underpainted with the rich brown
of the pintail. The bill was the same blue-grey and black of a pintail, and
was the same size and shape as a Pintail bill. Very different from a
Mallard!. The breast was chestnut, but was noticably paler than on nearby
pure Mallards. The back was more uniformly grey than a Mallard, though it
didn't really look like a pintail back either. The tail was the same black
and white of a Mallard; not at all like a Pintail's, and the tail plumes
were like the curly Mallard ones, not the very long ones of the Pintail.
But the tail plumes didn't curl - they stuck straight out like a Pintail's!
The most subtle feature I noted was that the small white collar split at the
back of the neck, and curved upwards as two very short parallel stripes.
>From the rear, this matched the basic patterning of the Pintail's neck
striping, though the stripes only extended upwards about an inch.

In general, with the exception of the bill, the morphology was mostly
Mallard, including sizes and shapes of feathers. But feather coloration,
and the behavior of the tail feathers showed clear Pintail influence. The
pond held about 75 Mallards and about 10 Pintails along with Am. Wigeon, Am.
Coots, N. Shoveller, and Pied-billed Grebe. The hybrid drake seemed to hang
out with the Mallards.

It made for a very striking individual.

By the time I got back to the Kent Ponds at 11:30, the gate was open. I
then discovered that there was a second entrance further south (I had been
checking the gate right next to Anderson Park). I don't know if that other
gate was open at 10:00 or not.

There were lots of ducks, a couple of Redtails, a Cooper's Hawk, and two
Kestrel, but nothing terribly exciting. Pishing at any clump of tall weeds,
grasses, or cat-tails brought forth a bunch of Song Sparrows, a couple of
Lincoln's Sparrows, and a Marsh Wren. (I think I pished three places, and
got the same quantities of the same three species each time). A couple of
Savannah Sparrows were also flitting around, as were at least a dozen
Western Meadowlark.

==Michael Hobbs
==