Hooded Mergansers return to local pond in LA

[AndyB]

If your only experience with Hooded Merganser is of a shy and retiring bird, the birds that favor the small local pond at Los Encinos Park, Los Angeles, couldn't be further from it. I hear the first returning winter birds showed up this week and I will try and get out there to take a look tomorrow.

This shows how small the lake is. You can walk right up to most of the winter wildfowl which includes Lesser Scaup, Bufflehead and Ring-necked Ducks amongst others.

http://www.surfbirds.com/media/gallery_photos/20031123102314.JPG

nice male Hoodie
http://www.surfbirds.com/media/gallery_photos/20031123102451.jpg

If you think this bird (http://www.surfbirds.com/blog/DD/8888) in Britain is a bit too tame for a vagrant, it's lack of wariness shouldn't be a strike against it.

[RoyW]

You can walk right up to most of the winter wildfowl which includes Lesser Scaup, Bufflehead and Ring-necked Ducks amongst others.

A good example Andy.

Rare wildfowl seem to be automatically 'written off' as escapes if they are tame - all though no-one seems to have any problem with other birds being approachable (some recent examples in Britain including Green Heron, Desert Wheatear and Steppe Grey Shrike).
'Common' wildfowl is also not questioned if it is tame (eg. Tufted Ducks comng to bread in a park) - and surely if a normally timid bird ends up in the same place it will soon learn, by observing them, that it is safe to approach?

I know that wildfowl are common in captivity, and do frequently escape, but just because they are tame it doesn't mean that they must have a suspect origin.

PS. Before anyone says anything I am well aware that the three examples I mentioned are all birds that are unlikely (perhaps never) to be found in captivity - they are just meant to show that wild birds can be tame!

[AndyB]

It's always interesting (and usually anti-climactic) showing visiting birders their life Ross's Goose. It's often mid summer and the goose is one of several wild birds that decide to not return north and are a permanent fixture of local parks, scavenging bread amongst the pigeons and feral geese. I literally have seen toddlers stroking them. They are wild birds that have decided it's easier to hang out in southern California than do the migration thing.

[MichaelF]

Had a tame Barnacle Goose on an urban boating lake near Newcastle a few years ago, which came waddling up demanding bread. It had a numbered plastic ring on, so I took the number and sent it off to Caerlaverock more as a joke than anything. Got a reply back, saying it had been ringed as a gosling 16 months before, at Ny Ålesund on Spitzbergen. So it was a genuine wild bird . . .