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Last week I mentioned He-Man and I went on a not so spontaneous trip down to Henderson, NV. Not so spontaneous because I have been wanting to go down since December when the Long-tailed Ducks were first reported being seen there. They have wintered there since December! I needed two-three days with nothing planned so we could go down.
Henderson is just the next town south of Las Vegas. The ducks were continuing to be seen and we finally had a couple of days free to go so off we went on a little road trip.
There were 3 Female Long-tailed Ducks staying in the ponds at the Henderson Bird Viewing Preserve. We arrived on Sunday afternoon after the Preserve had closed, so our plan was to get there when it opened Monday morning at 7AM. We arrived just a few minutes after they opened, signed in, spoke with the person working there about where to start in the preserve to see the Long-tailed Ducks. They gave us great pointers.
We didn’t see them on our first pass of the pond they were being sighted at so we moved on and explored some other ponds. There are 9 ponds in the preserve.
On our second pass by pond 5 He-Man spotted one! I moved to get better light and there they both were!
Here’s the first one we saw.
Here’s the second one. They were easy to tell apart because their bills are different. One has some pink on it and the other one has an all black bill.
The female tails are much, much shorter than the males, but still they’re so cute. I was so excited to see them. The male remains on my “hope to see” list.
I saw 4 other new to me birds while there which I’ll share in future posts.
more to come…
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