This stud drake Green-winged Teal has found itself a female mallard to pair up with, and actually mated with her. Hoping this a successful courtship as it would be cool to see a hybrid brood between these two. Since this is not an autumn image, the yellow in the water is caused by a commination a distant huge still-bare weeping willow and some dried reeds at the far edge of the pond. I was in a very uncomfortable pose to get a low angle, including my being head lower than rest of my sideways lying body, so gave myself some extra shutter speed to compensate for some inevitable camera shake that may have been introduced with the awkward handholding position.
Canon R6 + 500mm f/4 II + 1.4TC III, manual exposure, evaluative metering, 1/2500s., f/5.6, ISO 3200, natural light, handheld, CW rotation then cropped to about 75% FF, tamed the yellow tail feathers via burn tool (and then sponge to add back saturation) as the were near blown. Same for the white stripe (minus the sponge).







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