Florida Masked duck

     Well, we are back in the Sunshine state and while it is not exactly totally sunny, we are getting periods of good light for photography and general viewing of the southern birds.  For several weeks prior to our coming down to Florida, I've been following reports of a pretty rare bird not too far from where we spend out winters  The bird is the Masked duck, and although it is generally a tropical bird, it does make an occasional venture into south Texas and Florida.  When we arrive in Florida for the season, we normally spend the first day at Merritt Island....kind of a tradition with us for the past 9 years.  But the Masked duck was cause to change the paradigm and go chasing birds once again.

      When we arrived at the site, Viera Wetlands, we were greeted by a compliment of birders from the Space Coast Birding Festival which was held at Brevard Community College this past weekend.  They had positve reports regarding the duck and once we felt confident we knew the whereabouts of this rarity, we hopped in the car and headed out onto the dikes of the impoundments.  We found a group of 5 or 6 folks with scopes trained out onto the shallow body of water  and they immediately put us on the bird.  Normally, Masked ducks are tough to see because they like to honker down in the thicker weeds.  Florida got hit with some abnormally cold weather the past couple of weeks, however, and the weeds were knocked way down.  Hence, we had little trouble finding and following the little guy around the pond.  As we watched and photographed the duck, another "skulker", the Limpkin, happened by and flew right in front of me.  Since I was already making images of the duck, it was simply a matter of pointing the camera in a slightly different direction to get a nice shot of this Florida specialty.  Along with hundreds of black and turkey vultures which had descended upon a nearby pond which had suffered a major fish kill due to the freezing temps, we had around 40 other species including plenty of ducks, a nice American bittern, anhingas, herons and so on.  But the catch of the day was certainly the elusive Masked duck with a little dash of Limpkin on the side.