When I woke up this morning I had an itch to look at ducks. This time of year is good for finding rare or unusual ducks hiding out in larger groups of more common waterfowl. So today after coffee Ilarion and I walked along the Spree until we found a large gathering of birds bobbing around together in an elbow of the river not far from our apartment.

We were lucky. Among a group of mallards (Stockente) were a pair of very strangely colored ducks. They showed similar markings to the mallards but had white necks and chests and a generally splotchy look. It turns out that they were mallard hybrids. The male had a splotchy green head and a browner variation of the usual mallard coloring, while the female had an amorphous grey and white blotchy coloring with no discernible pattern, with the exception of very white wingtips. According to the books, this type of thing happens when mallards mate with domesticated ducks and the phenomenon isn’t uncommon. These two certainly seemed to be a pair, keeping together while moving around in the great throng of birds.

There must have been a few hundred birds in this corner of the Spree. We saw a great number of young and old swans, mallards, a tidy little group of tufted ducks (Reiherente), innumerable coots (Blässhühner) and a few mandarin ducks hanging out by the shore. We were happy to find a single example of a common moorhen (Teichhuhn), with its recognizable red and yellow beak, hiding among the bare branches of a bush that extended over the water. I haven’t yet seen a moorhen in Berlin and was excited to make a new tag in my book.

Also, we noticed a coot with a light blue tag around its neck, marked A53 or A54 or A57…we can’t remember the number exactly. I attempted to look him up today, but couldn’t find a database that contained this type of tag. Too bad!