The Dabbling Mallard

While on our ongoing quest to photograph the many species of ducks that either reside here or stop here during the annual migration we tend to ignore the common Mallard.  Without question the Mallard is a beautiful quacker with interesting coloring and markings.  The vibrant green head and familiar white ring make them a duck that is easily recognized and identifiable by most everyone.  They are thought of as a dabbling duck and not really a diving duck.  They tend to dabble to get their food.

There is a variety of Mallards that we have spotted and do find quite intriguing but as of yet they have escaped the wrath of my DSLR.  This particular Mallard sports a beautiful purple head but the rest of the coloration looks like any other Mallard.  For whatever reason the purple headed Mallard seems to know he is unique and is a lot more camera shy then the typical Mallard.  At this point we haven't taken any Blog worthy images  of the purple headed Mallard but that day will come.

Okay, so the Mallard is a pretty common quacker and we rarely find them centered in our viewfinder.  The keyword here is "rarely".  That doesn't mean that we never capture images of the lowly Mallard.  Now and then the colorful Mallard will catch our eye and we fire off a few frames and simply store them in our huge archives of nature images.  Mallards and Geese seem to be everywhere and are so common and easy to photograph that we typically won't give them a second glance.  In fact we find geese so loud and obnoxious that we don't take their pictures just to spite them.  I know, that's a bit childish but we've stepped in enough goose droppings to last a lifetime and we've had their loud honking expose our presence more often than we care to talk about.  This particular Mallard caught our eye as we scanned a backwoods wetland in search of Wood Ducks.  For some reason I found the light interesting and he had just been dabbling for food which left some awesome water droplets on his plumage.  So now nobody can say that we have ignored the common Mallard!