Sometimes as a wildlife photographer you get lucky and the animal you are watching puts on a show for you or the conditions like lighting and background line up and you wind up with some extra special photographs. These times make up for when things don’t quite work out.

I had been watching a pair of male wood ducks puttering around the shoreline dabbling for bits of food here and there. They looked like they were just killing time while the women were off doing the nesting thing. They are beautiful ducks but where they were swimming was kind of drab and wasn’t showing them off to their best advantage; that is, until they ambled over to a log and climbed up on it to have a preening session.

They twisted this way and that and spent about a half-hour primping up all their feathers. I guess they wanted to look their best when the........

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