Female Hooded Merganser

We’ve had a rough week of weather for photography but I managed to get out for a couple of hours on Friday morning. My initial purpose was to again locate and photograph the leucistic Varied thrush. Even though I found a couple of Varied thrushes in the area in which the bird had last been reported, I did not see the leucistic thrush. This probably makes me about zero for six on those excursions for the past couple of weeks.

Male Hooded Merganser

I decided to perform a little birding from the car as the chances of rain seemed to be too high to get afield. I eventually drifted over to Pass Lake where I found a couple of Hooded mergansers paddling around behind brush piles. They were working to avoid a couple of fishermen so my photography session was interrupted, but while I was waiting a male Belted kingfisher flew into a nearby tree, so I also obtained photos of it.

Male Belted Kingfisher