The menu at your local Chez Raptor also includes small birds and fledglings. These include ducks, geese and swans, and duck-type birds such as cormorants, grebes, loons and coots. Dabbling ducks, like mallards, stick close to the surface for their algae and tiny water creatures. Diving ducks, like mergansers, dive for theirs. The duck you see butt-end up in a pond or lake is a dabbler.
Diving ducks are more dignified.
Birders tend to have favorites and these are mine. These fellows make their homes in creeks, rivers, marshes, and tidal basins. Their ranks include avocets, bitterns, cranes, egrets, herons, ibises, phalaropes, rails, snipe, stilts, and storks. Below is another wader, a snowy egret. Used under License.