The Egyptian Geese have been my favorite birds to watch at the park. I appreciate being able to put a name to them now. The cormorant pictures were interesting to me. Some days there are dozens of them sunning themselves and swimming around while other days I can’t find a single one. This is one of the busy days. The bird that is swimming caught my eye. It has tufts of white feathers on the side of its head behind its “ears”.
There are several ruddy ducks swimming around. They are hard to catch with the camera. They seem to dive under water more often than they swim on the surface. I did get a picture of one, though it isn’t very close. I’m not certain I will be able to catch the grackles that are making such a racket the last few days. I just caught a glimpse of one the other day but I sure know they are there. They almost make more noise than the geese.

I have a beginner’s camera and I haven’t been happy with the quality of my pictures. But instead of brooding about them I decided to post a few of them anyway. I came across a family of whistling ducks (my best guess) today at a local park, 2 adults and 5 babies. They seem to sound more like geese then ducks to me. They have red beaks and legs with a brown eye ring and a brown ring around their necks. The colors don’t come out very good in the pictures. Perhaps I am taking them at the wrong time of day, straight up noon. Everything is washed out looking. I also took a picture of some of the most common birds at the park, some mallards and coots. Since I noticed that some of the other weblogs are very distant from here I thought I might share some of the common birds with everyone. I don’t know what might be common here that isn’t common somewhere else. Let me know if you know what kind of bird the family of ducks actually is.