After the excitement of last week, anything would have seemed sedate. Sure enough, even though there was a moderate amount of pelican activity, my eyes frequently wandered off the big white birds to see what else was going on at Sunset Bay.

I saw this adorable little duck floating near the dock.

HI!

I don’t know much about ducks. To me she resembled a female blue-winged teal, but something about her didn’t look quite right.

She hopped up on a small branch that was sticking up out of the water and began to groom.

Once I saw her speculum, I wondered if she were a green-winged teal. I saw a male green-winged teal for the first time this past spring, but I’d never seen a female before.

She was so little and cute, and she was very itchy.

Scratching has never been so much fun!

There’s the spot!

Do you have a vacancy for a back-scrubber?

I went back to watching the pelicans for a while, and when I looked for her again, she was about to hop onto a branch where coots frequently perched. That’s when I got a real shock about her size.

. . . Yes?

I knew she was small, but I didn’t realize just how small she was until I saw her next to the coots. Her super-compact size made her seem even more adorable to me.

One of these things is not like the others . . .

When I went home I checked my bird books for an ID, and I feel pretty confident that she was indeed a green-winged teal. The next day, she was gone.