At Last: Mergansers!

Not even bothering to bury the lede here - a trip down to the spit with no expectations and I actually found the elusive hooded mergansers I’d spent the last few weeks searching for!

Nice thing about early January, you can show up at 8:30 and still get a 'sunrise'.

I did have a different strategy going into this one. I’d previously focused my search in two places - the inner harbour where you could still find ice-free pools between the docks, and the bottleneck of the floating bridge where the majority of the winter waterfowl congregate. These were sheltered areas with a good track record, just with the small problem of not actually having any hooded mergansers…

This time I went for the open lake, following the winding trail that runs parallel to the main road into Tommy Thompson Park. And it turns out that’s where they’d been hiding - in plain sight, out there bobbing on the waves of a lake Ontario unencumbered by breakwater.

I’m not one to look a gift merganser in the bill, but the one difficulty is you don’t get particularly interesting footage out of monotonous water at a distance - even when the males are livening things up with a little display. 

Majestic.

I filmed the hell out of them anyway, because they were the mergansers in front of me, but I’m still hoping to catch some more closer to shore and with some more interesting environs. It’s a start!

Out into the open lake I also saw groups of other winter waterfowl - goldeneyes, grebes, I heard some long-tailed ducks tri-toning, plus there was the usual contingent of trumpeter swans. All the species I’m used to seeing at the floating bridge. But after filming from shore for twenty minutes or so, it felt like I had gotten all possible versions of ‘merganser floats along placidly’, and I moved on.

Western Grebes, grebing.

Some chickadees (and a small flock of sparrows) flitted along the path but never stayed in one place long enough to really catch on camera. Plus I also had one more mission I was b-lining to while I was here. The merganser episode I’m working on concerns diving ducks in general, so I wanted to do some ‘diving’ shots with the help of a GoPro and a selfie stick, dunking into the frigid water in the open pools where they congregate. Like the one at the floating bridge.

But on approach, I found out why, possibly, all of those ducks had been out on the open lake instead: the reliable bottleneck had finally been closed up by ice. No more open water. Nowhere to dunk. 

I checked a few other spots on the way back. I also considered just doing the dunking at the lakeshore where I had filmed the mergansers, but it wasn’t the right vibe. I needed an open pool bordered by ice, and I needed the bottom to look tantalizing for foraging and digging into. The outer shore is just gravel and construction waste. So I saved the diving shots for another time - I’m thinking of doing a sweep of the Humber river (also frozen over the last time I checked, actually…) and Humber Bay Park, which is supposedly another hotspot for mergansers - both good candidates for a camera dunking. 

I’ll also have to see how my GoPro behaves. I’ve had it die on me in cold water pretty instantaneously a few times before - not that the camera gets damaged, just that the battery can’t handle it. I’m hoping I can rely on it for the five seconds or so underwater (at 60fps)  and then if it taps out, I’ll have gotten what I need.