Some of my earliest memories of bird watching, about which I became serious from the age of 12, were of winter hikes along Lake Ontario looking at rafts of winter ducks. These rafts would float in undulating patches, disappearing and reappearing as the movement of the water changed. It was many years before I saw the scaups in their breeding grounds in the far north and thought of them as individuals or pairs; I had always thought of them as flocks. - Robert Bateman