Ring-necked Duck Gallery

Ring-necked duck at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge
Misnamed?
Whenever I make notes about these beautiful little ducks in my journal, the first name that comes to mind is ring-billed duck. The male’s bill pattern is striking, a thick white ring near the black tip at the front and a thin white ring at the base. Those rings jump out at you in the field and are one easy way to distinguish ring-bills from scaup.

Problem is, the ducks are named ring-necks and not ring-bills.

Are they misnamed? Not technically, no, as they do have a reddish ring between the purplish neck and black chest. It’s just very hard to see, you need the right light and the right luck to see it. A hint of the neck ring is visible at the front of this ring-bill.

Ring-neck. Right, right. Ring-neck.
Ring-necked duck at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge
Not Misnamed
Here’s proof that these beautiful little ducks aren’t misnamed: the reddish ring around it’s neck is pretty clear here. On one of its diving expeditions, it picked up the plants that are draped across its back.
A male ring-necked duck swims through duckweed
Ring in Red
A male ring-necked duck swims through duckweed in Bower Slough at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge.
Ring-necked duck preparing to dive at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge
Slicked Back
This male has a slicked-back look where it has pulled its crest down tight around its head, the classic sign that a diving duck is getting ready to Dive! Dive! Dive!
A female ring-necked duck preens at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge
Plumages
Bird identification can be a tricky business, I put myself in the good but not great category when it comes to visual identification (and terrible at aural identification). Ducks tend to be one of the easier species to identify, at least for the males, as their plumages tend to be rather distinctive, and even the simplest bird guides will include illustrations of the males. Female ducks get more difficult, especially when they aren't near their male counterparts, and bird guides targeted at the casual birder don't always include their plumages. All of the serious ones do, however, and while the differences are often more subtle than the males, most species do have notable differences between them.

It doesn't stop there, however, as males usually have a breeding and nonbreeding plumage, and the nonbreeding plumage sometimes makes the male look a lot more like the female. Fewer guidebooks do a good job with these alternate plumages, the Sibley guide is my favorite precisely because it makes no pretense at being a pocket guide and includes illustrations of the males in both forms. It gets even more complicated when you introduce juvenile birds to the mix, as they often resemble the females as well during the early months of their lives.

And of course there is not only sometimes variation from one geographical region to another, but also natural variation from one individual to the next. And then there are the intermediate stages when a bird molts from one plumage to the next, and let's not even get started on interbreeding …

So what about this ring-necked duck, one of a pair that wintered near North Quigley Lake at Ridgefield? It's not an adult male, not only are ring-necks in breeding plumage in December when this picture was taken, but even the nonbreeding plumage looks different than this. Based on the drawing in Sibley, it resembles the juvenile a bit more than the adult female, but based on his timelines the young birds should be well into their adult plumages by this time, and I have seen a fair amount of variation in female ring-necks in the winter and spring at Ridgefield.

So I suspect this is an adult female ring-neck (but I wouldn't bet my life on it).

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October 30, 2011