The Agony and the Ecstasy

I haven't posted in awhile because I've been hunting (with a camera) for a very specific Mystery Animal. Unfortunately, just like with the old Marx Brothers' routine I keep going to the ball game but the Mystery Animal refuses to show up, and if you don't know what routine I'm talking about please watch Duck Soup. This is why nature photography is so much fun of course, sometimes you get the great stuff and sometimes you don't. And I'll be looking for the Mystery Animal this weekend so maybe I'll get lucky.


For now you'll have to suffer with these older shots of Long-tailed Ducks. They're actually out-of-season in Toronto at the moment photography-wise, you can only see them in the spring and fall and some of the winter. Often you can hear them before you actually lay eyeballs on them; they make a very insistent and unique call that sounds like this.

I left the files of the flying images pretty large so you can get a much better look by clicking on them. In the more static images you can see the male's 'tail' quite clearly, though the shot of him and the female would have been better from a lower angle. Oh, well.

I think the best place to see these guys when they're here is the Leslie Street Spit.