Adventure Time and Discovering Diving Ducks for the First Time

Written and photographed by tom shidaker Editied
Jan 24, 2017
2 min read

Saturday was a wonderful day. We hit the 50's. Pretty good for January in Indiana. So, I grabbed my camera and initally just my nifty fifty (50 mm prime lense), but something told me to grab the telephoto, the 75-300mm, lens. I'm glad that I did. I still wish that I had the money to upgrade to a larger telephoto lens because of my love of wildlife, but my 75-300mm does the job for now. And I am so happy that I did grab it.

So, I head out for a nice photography walk down by the St Joe River, which I haven't done for a couple of months. At first I only found the typical mallard ducks.

Reaching one of my favorite spots, there is a boat landing about a half mile from the house. In the fall I found alot of beautiful flowers, bees, butterflies, ducks, and geese down there...Here are some of the old pictures from the fall..

However, this trip was a bit different. I ran across two different breeds of what I do believe are diving ducks. I don't know alot of bird breeds. It is something that I haven't yet had a chance to encounter, or even photograph before.

After googling these types of ducks when i got home, my deduction is that they were common golden eye, and a bufflehead.

I had a blast watching these ducks diving into the water. Then, it was trying to figure out where they were going to resurface.

It usually ended up being bout 10 feet away from where they had originally dived. i set the camera to shoot in burst shot, just trying to capture them diving.

Well, I never got exactly the shot that I was looking for. Mainly, it was just their tail feathers sticking up from the water, or just a ripple where they went had under.

This is one taking off for flight, which I must admit I was very happy with.

As I was leaving to head home... I took a few last shots of the bufflehead. I got a wonderful shot of it getting ready for its dive, with its reflection on the river.

It wasn't necessarily the shot that I wanted, but it was still an awesome shot.

Hopefully, this is a sign of things to come for the new year. So, until the next adventure, I hope you enjoyed this adventure as much as I did.