Winter's Ducks

Here is a nice winter scene to commemorate our first major snow of the year. I took this image a few years ago right after a larger snowstorm. It shows a bufflehead duck swimming across a nearby pond. Its striking white and black markings allowing it to blend into the snowy landscape.

The bufflehead is one of several duck species that breed in the lakes of the great boreal forests of Canada and then fly south to the Chesapeake Bay region. While hundreds of thousands of ducks still winter in the area, their numbers have decreased in the past half century, mainly due to degradation of the Bay.

View more winter photographs in my gallery.