A waterfowl friend of mine (I'm from Talbot County, Maryland - waterfowl capital!) has identified them as Scaup, aka Bluebill. A "Bluebill" is the Greater Scaup. My 6th edition "Birds of Reston" checklist has a Lesser Scaup as being rarely seen in Spring and Fall. Please come to the public dock near the bridge at the west end of the Lake this weekend and help identify!!!

Hi Connie! I can't see the photo well enough, but the center left guy may also be a bufflehead. Hooded mergansers pass through too but you can tell them because their heads look like they're having a bad hair day... ; ) I'll keep the binnoculars handy.

I just looked and was lucky enough to see a pair of hooded mergansers! Do we get scaups here? Your description seems kind of like them.

Beth - email me connie at actwebservices . com so I can send you the 5MB photo to zoom in on.

Beth - I can spy with my binoculars that duck near you with the huge white patch - that must be the Hooded Merganser! The Scaups have floated down near you - across the lake a bit. Tomorrow may need to be a boat day.

Yesterday there were 10 of them together near us! Connie and I were thinking greater scaups instead of lesser scaups b/c of greenish glint from head feathers in the bright sun.. I've never seen them here but I'm not a birding pro.

BTW, the hooded mergansers have these big head crests for lack of a better term. They pass through here briefly - I think usually in March. The females can look like they're having a bad hair day...
http://identify.whatbird.com/obj/390/_/Hooded_Merganser.aspx

It would be nice to have a Reston on-line bird discussion group/thread/thing.

This morning two non-ducks aka adult bald eagles in the same tree the eagles have been in before. And one fish crow harassing the heck out of one of them.

Red-shoulder hawks (I think, maybe Coopers?) are pretty common in my neighborhood. This past fall, a juvenile actually landed on our deck to check out the squirrels hunting for acorns. It was absolutely fantastic to see one up close.

I have been observing this variety of diving duck for the past 6 weeks at Lake Newport and Bright Pond. These are Ringneck ducks. The ring on the neck of the male is not very visible, but the distinguishing field marking is the highly visible white ring around the bill. By the way, I've also been watching Bufflehead ducks on bright pond.

Neil, I agree with your ring-necked duck i.d. for some - I saw a few too. A bunch of the others on Audubon (with binoculars a few times over two days) have had no white ring on the bill - I was looking for it. I hadn't seen them before.

The two ducks on the left are ring-necked ducks. The left duck is the female ring-necked - dark brown back; light brown flank; a faint, light "spur" on the shoulder; and the white spot on the bill just back of the dark tip help identify it. For the male ring-necked, second from left, you can make out the white outline on the bill in the picture quite clearly. His head is more pointed, the back is black, and the flank is light with a white/gray "spur" jutting up at the shoulder.

The other two ducks are scaup, with the right-most duck the female and the second-from-right duck being the male. On the female there is less contrast between the flank and top, as in the ring-necked female, and the white patch at the base of the bill is very distinctive as a female scaup. The male has a light flank and back, as opposed to the male ring-necked which has a black back. It also lacks the white outline on the bill and the pointed head.

Very cool! I avoided head gloss, because most of what I read (Sibley's, National Geographic) said it could be misleading. Lesser is more likely to be here than Greater when viewing range maps, but, of course, the birds don't read the guides to know where they should be...

If I was to go purely by size the scaup in the picture was large enough, in comparison to the ring-necked ducks, to be a greater scaup. I had seen two lessers on Lake Audubon in that area at the end of January.

Thanks, Beth - I may take you up on that offer!

There are 6 male and a few female Ringneck ducks on the drainage pond near Reston Town Center just east of the FFX County Parkway. Excellent viewing of these duck from the levee.

We have two wood duck boxes, and the wood ducks use one every year - and also hang out on our deck railing (which is a story high because of the hill) and eat safflower/millet seed mix out of songbird tube feeders. The wood ducks were a month early last year and we're going on the assumption it will happen again.

Wood ducks are back! Two males just swam by our dock. We rebuilt our deck where they perch - hope it doesn't spook them since it's plastic lumber and feels different than wood. (It's not Trex, whiich contains wood; it's 100% recycled milk jugs, about as heavy as oak.)

The eagles are still here! Very exciting because they usually only stay a couple days and they have been here at least 2 weeks. I see them on Lake Thoreau. They hang out on "the point" a lot. Ken, do you thing they might nest here?

I think it is great they are still around to see. I don't think they would nest here - lots of human activity. If they did, it would probably be ill-fated at best. I have heard many stories of abandoned nests due to human activity disturbing eagles. I don't know if these stories are overblown, but I would think our lakes are too busy for eagles to nest on. I hope they prove me wrong.

This morning a single adult bald eagle was in our yard twice, once on a short tree near the water and once higher up. I wonder if there is a nest somewhere - even down in Snakeden, which is more isolated. If there is, there'd be eggs by now, so maybe one of the two I've been seeing is on a nest.

A good eagle cam and blog in Blackwater Wildlife Refuge in Maryland is here: http://blackwatereaglecam.wordpress.com/ (Cam and other links are to the right of the blog entry.)

I've asked Lisa, the web master/blogger many questions over the past few years - she's terrific at parsing eagle stuff. : )

I hope eagles never nest in full view on the lakes; too risky.

I could be wrong about eggs. Inland they may lay them late February/early March. I also don't want to start a rumor that there is a nest. http://www.friendsofblackwater.org/eagle.html