Joy Fall

It's fall! Some birds are just totally in shock.
Heron: "DUDE it's NOVEMBER WTF!"

Migrant birds are returning to the lake. Here's a glaucous winged gull that attracted my attention with its strange yodeling call. It sounds quite different from a Western gull when claiming food. Or maybe only when it's claiming a bit of roast chicken someone dumped. I don't know whose action is more surprising: the guy who thought it would be fine to throw a chicken to the birds, or the pigeons who thought it would be fine to eat it. Blech, guys, srsly.

Ruddy ducks have arrived. These are easy to ID at long distances because of the white cheek, and the (usually) long pointy tail.

Ring billed gulls are back too and looking for action. "Hey, where's MY roast chicken?"

And of course scaups. I have vowed that this will be the year I learn to tell greater from lesser. I have long wondered why the majority of scaups I see at the lake are male. One theory I had was that females and males arrived and left at different times. The first one I saw this year was female: