Earlier this week, I added a bird to my lifelist: the Lesser Scaup. I saw a group of them bobbing in the Tidal Basin, looking knackered (quite frankly). There didn’t seem to be any hens; I had initially thought that the slightly dingier ones were hens, but Peterson’s clarified that they are distinctly brown. According to my Birds of Virginia guide, they are resident year-round throughout the state, so my initial assumption that they were migrating through was likely incorrect (although they still could have been recently returned from their winter vacation).

At any rate, I had seen scaups in Oregon, but I didn’t (at the time) know what to look for to tell the greater from the lesser. On these ones, the slant of the head was clearly noticeable (I knew what to focus on this time around), and they were close enough to the shore that I could estimate their size with greater accuracy.