Hi Tweets,

While helping Peter Woods today with his chronicling of Stanley Park flora
and fauna, we relocated (present on Lost Lagoon since Saturday Feb 09 2008 )
a male hybrid between Tufted Duck *Aythya fuligula* and one of the scaup
species. We had direct, sustained views of the bird at very close range,
with direct comparison between it and definitively-plumaged males of the two
scaup species, Lesser Scaup *A. affinis* and Greater Scaup *A. marila*. From
the bird's relatively small size and structure---closer to that of Lesser
Scaup than Greater---we provisionally assigned the other parentage to Lesser
Scaup.

The state of molt is that of a male bird, perhaps a First Winter, entering
Pre-Alternate Molt, with pale narrow grey vermiculations emerging from the
Basic/immature back plumage (Tufted Duck back is solid black), white sides
vertically and smudgily barred pale brown, and black head, neck and frontal
shield which merges into blackish-brown mottled pale brown on the shoulders.
The facial sheen is dark green, but this was in poor and failing light. The
eye is situated forward on the face, while the bill seems standard for
Tufted Duck, with large black nail outlined white. The crest: rather than
comprised of two or three specialised non-rigid feathers as it would be in
pure Tufted Duck, the crest on this bird seems to be a more rigid extension
of the regular rear-crown feathers, being thickly-based and quickly tapering
to a point. At close range, it is strikingly different.

The bird was with an equally-tame mixed-duck panhandling flock along the
concrete-edged east side of the Lagoon.

Peter hopes to have photographs of this bird on his website shortly at:

http://www.stanleyparkexplorer.ca/

Michael Price
Vancouver BC Canada