Rainy day on Cougar Creek

It looked like rain. But maybe there was time for a quick walk around Cougar Creek Park before it started.

There wasn't. We walked around the lake, anyhow, shielding our cameras inside our jackets. We need shoulder-strapped umbrellas.

First drops of rain.

Good mushrooming weather. These shaggy manes were right beside the path.

The others weren't so easy to identify:

Small purple balls, barely an inch across.

Deep vases, mostly full of rainwater.

The bushes and trees, dark and dripping, were full of birds. We saw a pair of wrens, flickers, a cute little downy woodpecker, besides the usual robins, crows, sparrows and mallards.

And this:

I know it's blurry; that's the best we could do. Here's the story:

Under the trees at the first bridge over Cougar Creek, there was a great commotion of splashing. A few mallards were diving for leaves. Yes, they were mallards. Green heads on the males, drab females, blue speculum on all. But they were diving, not just up-ending to reach for the bottom. They weren't too good at it, hence the splashing.

We watched as repeatedly they went down, well underwater, selected a sunken leaf, brought it to the surface and abandoned it. Laurie says they were playing, not feeding.

One, the one in the photo, was different. A hybrid. Long neck, like a grebe's, drab brown, with speckles of grey and green on the head, ring around the neck, and the blue speculum. This one was a good diver; it went down and disappeared, coming up some time later, and a good distance away. Still splashed more than most diving ducks do, though.

After a while, another small flock of mallards swam down the creek and joined the divers. These ones dabbled, like puddle ducks are supposed to.

Questions: is the good diver a grebe/mallard hybrid? And did he teach his brood-mates the game?

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