Long-tailed Duck near Canon City,CO

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This afternoon, while doing a little birding to see what is around now that I am back from a long trip to So Texas, I drove out to Brush Hollow Reservoir about 15 northwest of Canon City to see if the recent high winds had blown anything unusual in. Indeed far in the distance I spotted this female Long-tailed Duck. She was more than 400 feet away when I took the top pic which is greatly enlarged from what I saw since I used my 400 mm lens with a 1.4 extender. Since my new Canon 60d dslr camera is not full frame the photo has an additional 1.6 magnification so the combination is approximately equivalent to a photo taken by a 900 mm lens or about 18 times the size seen with naked eyes. It is hard to see the little duck in that top pic but it, and a slightly larger Common Goldeneye near it, are directly under the text.
The bottom pic is just an enlargement of the top pic. I took the pic from the slight elevation on the east side of the reservoir at the top of the boat ramp because this Long-tailed Duck is small enough that viewing it from the shoreline made it even more difficult to see since the wind was quite blustery and the waves often obscured it. This is the second Long-tailed Duck I have found in my area, the first one was in 2007 on the Arkansas River just east of Canon City. More pics to come. SeEtta

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