A visit to Blag Dog Lake before the snow came.

Before the snow and really cold weather came I took a short trip over to Black Dog Lake after work one day. Parts of the river and lake had iced over but there was still plenty of open water. Most of what I saw was your pretty common birds for this area like Canadian geese and mallards, but mixed in with the mallards I found a pekin duck.
Pekin ducks are a popular domesticated duck that are typically used for the commercial production of eggs and meat.

They were originally bred from mallards in China and imported to the US in the late 1800s.It appears that this one had gone native and decided to explore it's wild roots. It was accompanied by 2 to 3 male mallards.I also got a couple of shots of hooded mergansers. Hooded mergansers are the second smallest in the merganser family and the only merganser that lives exclusively in North America.There were also some common mergansers on the river but they were too far away to get any descent pics.