Have I mentioned I’m fond of ducks? (heh) How can winter be bad when there’s such a wealth of ducks everywhere? Even though many of our winter days are quite dark, as they tend to be at this latitude in the Pacific Northwest, the ducks are always busy doing ducky things. Overcast or rainy days are especially dim and wind kicks up choppy waves which can make it a challenge to see them, but sometimes the sun comes out and it’s quite cheery. The ducks can manage any kind of weather, and I’ll brave it to see them.
These are some of the ducks I’ve seen in my local three local bays this past week. My usual daily walking route takes me to at least two of these bays. The ducks aren’t always around, moving from bay to bay as the wind and forage suits them, but usually someone’s livening up one or two of them.
December 26, the southeast-facing bay.
We’d just had several days of strong SE winds and the swells were still coming in, even on this refreshingly sunny day. Lots of driftwood had been floated by king tides and then washed into this bay, still bobbing around at a fairly high tide. Red-breasted mergansers were cruising from one side of the bay to the other, hunting. That means swimming fast, head mostly down scanning for fish, occasionally diving briefly to snatch one up. The bottom is 10-15 feet here. There weren’t many buffies around this day but it looked like the mergansers goosed one from below. All these mergansers were hens and youngsters.
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December 31, the west-facing bay.
Calm weather, mostly overcast. You can see how much flatter the water surface is compared to the SE bay a few days earlier.
Most of the 40-50 buffies in the neighborhood were hanging out in the west-facing bay that day. There was also a small flock of Hoodies, who stayed close to the beach as they tend to do. Like the R-b mergansers in the SE bay, the Hoodies were also all hens and youngsters.
The buffies paddle around from shallow to deeper water. Farther out, where it was 20-30 feet deep, there were a few White-winged scoters and some scaups. Not sure if they were Greaters or Lessers — thoughts on that?
All these ducks are in the video below:
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January 1, the north-facing bay.
It was beautifully sunny calm day to start the year yesterday, if a little chilly. We still haven’t really had winter temps yet though, and when (if) we ever do, it’ll take some acclimatizing.
Aside from a handful, most of the buffies were still over in the bay around the headland. But for a little while a good size flock of Common mergansers cruised the bay. These were the most surprising ducks to see this past week since unlike their Red-breasted cousins, Common mergs are not often found in the saltchuck, at least around here, preferring freshwater lakes and ponds. I did see a few in the fog a couple of weeks ago and remember being surprised then too.
In this flock of two dozen there was one adult male with a lot of hens and youngsters. They were all hunting, using the same strategy as their cousins (paddling purposefully in a straight line, head down, scanning, diving, popping up). Once they all reached the headland, there was a fair bit of skirmishing. Too far for me to see what it was about, they might have been fighting over prey or just being youngsters. Mergansers like shallow water, so once they’d circuited the periphery of the bay and reached the end of the headland, they all took off at once, heading for a new spot.
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Bonus waterfowl —
On Sunday there was a lone White-fronted goose hanging out with the flock of 100 or so Canada geese in the north-facing bay. Occasionally random wayward geese stop by for a day or week or month, feeling it a comfortable spot I guess. Snow geese, Cackling geese, White-fronteds like this one. A goose is a goose is a goose when it comes to flocking in safety.
And then there’s the dozen swans in the island’s one lake, one of the few places for them this winter. The marshes where they’ve lived and foraged in past years are almost dry. Our rainfall has been unusually low.
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Temps in the 40s and fairly calm in the Pacific Northwest islands today. Overcast and showery.
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