Black Dog Merganser

I had hoped to blog from the Sax Zim Birding Festival that I attended this weekend but unfortunately I did not have Internet access at the hotel, which I stayed at. I did take a lot of shots of some great winter birds that I will be posting about shortly. I need to get them all down loaded first so while you wait here is a picture that I took at Black Dog Lake back on the 9th.
It was very cold and pretty quiet that Saturday I did find a common merganser female in the icy water.
Last year when we were in California we found a red-breasted merganser in the much warmer waters of the Elkhorn Slough. Red-breasted mergansers typically migrate to costal water, like those in California, during the winter.
We also found a female bufflehead in the harbor at Moss Landing. I have photographed bufflehead in Ca, Two Harbors, MN and the Bosque Del Apache in New Mexico.
When we on our whale watch looking for gray whales, I have already photographed humpbacks and orcas, we came across this common murre.
The common murre is a bird that we do not see in Minnesota. It spends most of its life in the sea and usually leaves the water only to breed on islands or rocky shorelines.