Male Red Breasted Merganser on the Skokie Lagoons

Today I discovered the Red Breasted Merganser 
(I found its name after doing some investigating on Google); one 
of the many species of winter ducks on the Lagoon. Mergansers look like
 mallards from a distance, but through a 300mm lens you 
could see that the male merganser is characterized by it's spiky 
hair and narrow beak, and the female by its orange eyes and 
long narrow brightly colored beak. 

It was kind of a surprise to see these sort of birds.  
The male merganser was perched on a log in
 the Lagoon when I approached him. The mallards that were with 
him had flown away, and I wondered why the merganser had stayed 
and then noticed its hair and realized it would make a phenomenal 
photograph because of how close I was to him. Then I made
 a mistake which will probably haunt me forever (or at least for a
 little while); I tried to climb down towards the water because I 
thought a lower angle would work perfectly as a photograph 
and the merganser would surely not fly away, and of course he 
did fly away and wasn't able to get a quality picture because his 
back was to me until the moment he landed in the water 
(bottom photo), and he flew to another part of the Lagoon when I tried 
to move closer. So I followed the merganser to that other part of the
 Lagoon and took a bunch of shots from afar (first photo, as close as I 
could get) while he was midst many other ducks, and after waiting for 
twenty minutes hoping that he would move closer I lost sight of him in 
the crowd of ducks and I decided it was hopeless. Seeing these sort of
 birds makes me wonder what other sort of obscure birds are 
lurking in the Lagoon.

Winnetka

Taken in February 2012