{"id":749,"date":"2013-01-18T14:13:14","date_gmt":"2013-01-18T19:13:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/naturalcrooks.com\/rambles\/?p=749"},"modified":"2025-05-14T19:18:45","modified_gmt":"2025-05-14T23:18:45","slug":"red-breasted-mergansers-display-lake-ontario-arkendo-park-mississauga","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/naturalcrooks.com\/rambles\/red-breasted-mergansers-display-lake-ontario-arkendo-park-mississauga\/","title":{"rendered":"Red Breasted Mergansers Make Their Moves on Lake Ontario off Arkendo Park, Mississauga"},"content":{"rendered":"

How to the Get the Girl, or Not<\/strong>
\nThe Red-breasted Mergansers showing off on Lake Ontario at Arkendo Park in Mississauga a few days ago seem to have an interesting courtship theory. The first part is to chase any other male away. Then the girls have to be lining up to meet you, right? Maybe? Can someone say yes?!<\/p>\n

Anyway, as I said, the first step is to try to get the other male to fly away. You do that by run-swimming across the surface of the water like a maniac making lots of waves and spray. If he won\u2019t budge, try to drown him by sort of ploughing over top of him.<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/a><\/p>\n

You may want to bite a bit at him at the same time.<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/a><\/p>\n

(It doesn\u2019t seem to occur to them that mergansers are DIVING ducks and are very hard to drown by pushing them slightly underwater, even in Lake Ontario.)<\/p>\n

Next, if that doesn\u2019t work, try to show him who is the mightier duck by putting on your coolest display. First, do that neck stretching straight up thing. After all, chicks dig the tall, green, white and rusty red guys.<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/a><\/p>\n

What?! He\u2019s doing it too?<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/a><\/p>\n

Quickly move on to your chest bob.<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/a><\/p>\n

Or transition right into the winner of the competition never-fail \u201cno one can beat this\u201d neck straight, chest bobbed, beak agape as you call out your love\u2019s name, tail flared, butt in the air chiller killer move.<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/a><\/p>\n

Alas, the other male just copies you and calls her name, too!<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\"Photo<\/a><\/p>\n

Ah well, time to try the ramming speed thing again.<\/p>\n

And as for the girlfriends. Sheesh? Couldn\u2019t they even stop fishing for five seconds to watch all this?! Talk about an unappreciative audience. One of them even fell asleep.<\/p>\n

Pity the fool for love.
\n\"Photo<\/a>
\nJoin In<\/strong>
\nHave you watched Red-breasted Mergansers flirting for the favour of the utterly indifferent femmes? Please share your experiences with a comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Will he get the girl? He’s certainly trying! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[25,834],"class_list":["post-749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-focus","tag-birds","tag-red-breasted-merganser"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naturalcrooks.com\/rambles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naturalcrooks.com\/rambles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naturalcrooks.com\/rambles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naturalcrooks.com\/rambles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naturalcrooks.com\/rambles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=749"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/naturalcrooks.com\/rambles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9645,"href":"https:\/\/naturalcrooks.com\/rambles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749\/revisions\/9645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naturalcrooks.com\/rambles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naturalcrooks.com\/rambles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naturalcrooks.com\/rambles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}