All those dots in the picture above are birds.  The picture below gives you a better perspective of the birds.

You can see all the Northern Shovelers in this picture below:

In the middle of this group, I saw a new bird: the Northern Pintail.

The Northern Pintail is uncommon in the winter, so I’m lucky to have seen him here.  Here’s a back view of the pintail and a female mallard lower in the picture.

In the winter, pintails eat plant materials from the water bodies.  I think this is a female on the left.  Female Northern Pintails look like female mallards with more white splotches.

I still can’t get over how beautiful the mountains look in the yellow light.

By the end of the birding trip it was almost sunset.  I’d never seen the sun setting over the mountains at Farmington Bay.  It was a gorgeous view.

and here’s the female:

some mallards generally match the plumage, but have some white on their front

and others have splotches all over

others don’t even have green feathers!

Manky Mallards will trick a novice birder at first into thinking they’ve found a really rare bird.  But alas, these Manky Mallards are the progeny of escaped domestic Mallards that were bred for food.

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This one doesn’t even have a yellow beak, but the shape of it is the same.

This guy is my favorite because he has an eyebrow.

The pale ducks like the one above were specifically bred to have apricot coloring.  This shading is referred to as “leucistic.”  So when you go to local ponds, you should enjoy the variation!

and warm

and it does not snow (like it did in Utah last night)

There were these beautiful lizards with blue undersides that came out onto pavement and rocks to do pushups.  Here’s the sequence:

down

up

down

up

I got pretty close to him, but everything happened so quickly that the pictures aren’t properly focused.  I saw a new bird on this trip, the Cinnamon Teal.

They’re very aptly named birds.  Most of the duck is cinnamon, with a little teal on the wing.

These are of course males.  The females look like all other ducks, so I can’t be sure if the brown-colored ducks I saw were Cinnamon Teals or Mallards.

The ducks were all sleeping and preening.  I managed to get a nice picture of their bright-red eye.

These guys are not quackers like Mallards.  The loudest noise that they’re supposed to make is a “Peep”

There are avocets, teals, and today’s feature: the Northern Shoveler.  Shovelers are very easy to identify because of their giant shovel-shaped beaks.  The male is on the right and the female is on the left.  Although the females have brown feathers like other female ducks, they can be distinguished by their large orange beaks.

They are easily frightened by the presence of humans, so I only got a few good pictures.  They are pretty common in the Bay Area during winter and prefer to hang out in any water bodies with muddy bottoms and vegetation.

The best pictures of the shovelers came from a tiny pond in the middle of grass fields.  Tonight I leave you with a pretty picture of what I believe is a cattail.  (If someone else knows better please feel free to correct me)

These are more pictures from the Baylands.  Each one of those little bumps is a sleeping duck.

Green-Winged Teals are beautiful ducks.  The male is below.  I particularly like the yellow near his butt.  It’s a great marker when you’re looking at different types of ducks from a distance.

Having become very used to seeing only Mallards, these guys are so different!  He has a very spotted front.

The females look just like female Mallards, except the color on the wing is green instead of purple.

Here is a female Mallard for comparison.

Like American Avocets, the Green-Winged Teal also searches the mud for food.