Not Your Average Duck.

The other day I found a new visitor had made a home for itself on an area of wetland near my home, from first sight I had my doubts as to whether it was your normal run of the mill duck as there was something a little different about its marking and the fact that it had chosen this particular pond to make its home and have chicks also peaked my interest as normally nothing much live here. When I got home out came the books to do a bit of research in the hope I might be able to identify this new resident and to my surprise I managed to find one duck which it look uncommonly like in the form of a bird called a Scaup, the only problem being it doesn't breed here and its only a winter visitor to this country usually only to be found around the coast mainly in Scotland. Thinking this very strange I decided to email a photo to the RSPB to get there opinion and a bit more info, luckily they replied saying that yes it did look like a Scaup but they doubted it was a truly wild one (most probably it had escape from a private collection) and had possibly breed with the more common Rudy duck resulting in what you see below.
        

 Tech. Details

F-stop- f/11

Expo- 1250secs

ISO- 2000

Expo Bias- 0 steps

Focal Length- 453mm

 Tech. Details

F-stop- f/11

Expo- 1000secs

ISO- 2000

Expo Bias- 0 steps

Focal Length- 425mm

Tech. Details

F-stop- f/11

Expo- 1000secs

ISO- 2000

Expo Bias- 0 steps

Focal Length- 500mm

The reason I'm including this here is because in the email from the RSPB they talked about the coastal habitiat that it'd normally live in if fully wild and how it likes to feed surprising near sewage outflows because of the large amount of worms. The thing is this pond is located near to a sewage farm and my thinking is that's whats attracted it to the area to breed, just goes to show how by creating wetland areas sometime you can get major unexpected results with the kind of animal life that makes it home there that you'd never normal hope to see there. Even if it isn't a fully wild example its still satisfying to see that even the smallest area of wetland can bring great results.