Tufted Duck: Yawning

Better in large ("L"): notice the horny lamellae around the edge of its beak, and if you look very closely you can see that its tongue has serrated edges!

This morning I was rather worried about what I was going to blip: the weather was bad and didn't look like it was going to improve, and I had no picturesque-looking plans lined up... This afternoon, however, the clouds parted and the sun appear: it was definitely pond o'clock!
I went to Wandsworth Common as I've not been there for a little while, and though that it might be nice to blip a little bird in the sun. There was lots of life to see: I saw siskins for the first time in London, but didn't manage a single shot (one caught my eye as it landed in a bush, and it turns out that there were 3 of them but they stayed deep within the branches), and photographed the chirpy, territorial robin that I've photographed a couple of times before. I also got a sweet shot of a long-tailed tit carrying twigs to make a nest. The light was beautiful, and all of the water birds were showing off their iridescence well: I photographed mallards and a pair of shovelers, and black-headed gulls scrapping with the gulls over bread. I even got some more photos of a crow's iridescence...

It has been so hard to choose a single picture today: I chose this one not because it was the most detailed or accomplished (that'd be the long-tailed tit, or one of the robin portraits, but it is too similar to ones I've blipped before...), but this is an unusual shot, and is related to the cutest thing that I witnessed today (and a few other days recently). The tufted ducks are courting at the moment, and this takes the form of several males following a female around making the cutest little noise; it isn't the sort of noise I'd expect a duck to make at all, but is so adorable. Producing the noise seems to involve their whole body, causing a tidy series of ripples to form every time they make it. This is a link to a (not very clean) recording on xeno-canto as I've no idea of how to describe the call!