Waterfowl at Ridgefield: Gallery #1
Bufflehead
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No Napkins
On occasion I’ve thought about starting special galleries dedicated to a particular aspect of the natural world, and this one would go into the “You’ve Got A Little Something …” gallery for animals with something on their face but no napkin to clean it with.
Bufflehead are diving ducks and this one has just surfaced with a bit of plant life hanging on its face. They eat underwater so you won’t see them surface with food the way that a coot or grebe would. While they do consume some plant matter, they primarily eat small creatures like snails, mussels, and Star Wars figurines.
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American Coot
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Ice Shelf
Winters in Portland are generally mild, but even we get the occasional cold snap. This one froze much of the water in the ponds at the refuge, forcing the animals into close quarters in the open water that remained. The coots were actively foraging for plant life in the shallow open waters, like this coot feeding in front of a sheet of ice. The foraging not only fed the coots but helped keep the open areas from freezing.
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Ice Walk
Coots share many characteristics with ducks — such as how water beads up on their backs — but also have differences. Walking on land (or ice, as the case were), you get a good look at the coot’s enormous feet and can easily see that they are not webbed as they are with ducks.
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Disguise
The bald eagles at Ridgefield prey upon the American coots. Ridgefield hosts a sizable population of coots, so the eagles pose no threat to the sustainability of the coots, but this is little consolation to the individual coot that happens to find itself in the eagle’s large talons and shortly thereafter its stomach.
Evidence of evolution in action, lately the coots have adopted a new technique: disguise.
One such example is this coot, whose large mustache is in fact a plant stem clasped in its beak. Simple but effective, as an eagle approaching for the kill will swerve away at the last moment, thinking that it has accidentally stumbled across not an American coot but a French one, what with its crazy mustache and most likely an outrageous accent.
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Salad
A coot surfaces and finishes devouring the plant life it plucked from the bottom of a shallow channel, drops of water still clinging to its back.
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Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert!
Coots are normally rather gregarious creatures, so its not unusual to see them feeding in small groups or even floating in large rafts. But when it comes time to choose a mate, even coots can get a little testy. This coot was getting an early start while it was yet winter, assuming an agressive posture and chasing off another coot from his little patch of water. A sudden cold snap had frozen most of the pond, so open water was hard to come by.
Swimming towards the other coot in this agressive pose seems to ward off most potential rivals, with the deposed coot getting a running start across the water surface before finally taking to the air.
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Restless Rest
Coots congregate in large numbers at Ridgefield during the winter and often stay close together. Come mating season however this camaraderie gets tested, the fights are usually short-lived but this tussle on Rest Lake went on and on. The coots try to hold each other under the water with their legs, at one point the losing coot had disappeared for so long that I thought perhaps it had drowned, but it finally surfaced a long ways away and swimming as fast as it could in the opposite direction.
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Staring Contest
This coot's nest sat only a few inches above the waterline, mostly hidden by the tall grasses that border South Quigley Lake. The first click of the camera’s shutter drew a sudden look from the coot, but afterwards it completely ignored me. I saw the coot on several visits but never got a picture, on this last visit I was more determined and inched the car along until I found a clean view through the grasses to the nest.
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Feeding Time
The young coot was rapidly growing and learning to search for food on its own, but it was still primarily relying on its parents to find its food.
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Ring-necked Duck
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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.
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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.
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Ring in Red
A male ring-necked duck swims through duckweed in Bower Slough.
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Slicked Back
This male has a slicked-back look where it has pulled its crest down tight around it’s head, the classic sign that a diving duck is getting ready to Dive! Dive! Dive!
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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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Ruddy Duck
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Ruddy Rain
I've always wondered where ruddy ducks get their name. On the one hand, it's rather obvious as males in breeding plumage have reddish bodies. But on the other hand, so do other ducks. There is a distinctive and glorious feature of the breeding male that wasn't chosen for the name, but for whatever reason we didn't end up with blue-billed ducks.
It was the blue bill that attracted me to these small ducks when I first saw them in a zoo, and I was delighted to find them out in the wild when we moved to the Northwest. During the winter at Ridgefield they are not in breeding plumage and tend to stay at a far distance from the road, but come spring they return to glory and a few are often found close in on South Quigley Lake as the males and females begin to pair up. The trick then is to find a clear view into the lake, which by late spring is mostly obstructed with grasses and cattails.
On this rainy day I parked in a good location and hoped the ruddies would come to me, as I had many times before, but this time I got lucky.
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The Charge of the Ruddy Brigade
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade
During mating season animals that most of the year get along well suddenly can get rather testy. The quiet little ruddy duck is not immune to these pressures as evidenced by this male's aggressive charge — though not at a rival in this instance for there were no other males around.
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The Revenge of Leonid Brezhnev
As a child I was terrified of Leonid Brezhnev — not his politics but his eyebrows. When this agitated ruddy duck furrowed his head feathers into giant eyebrows I couldn't help but think of the former Soviet leader. It was breeding season (for the duck, not the Soviets) and the male was annoyed by another in the area (his tail is also raised in defiance).
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Dive! Dive! Dive!
A male ruddy in breeding plumage feeds in South Quigley Lake at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge. Ruddies are diving ducks and dive under the water to search for food. You can tell when they are about to plunge under the surface as they pull their head feathers tight against their scalp (as shown in the second picture), giving a slicked-back look.
Off Color
During the breeding season, male ruddies have ruddy backs and bright blue bills, but they look a little off color in their eclipse plumage. The ruddy color disappears and the bill darkens, but they still retain the dark top of the head and white cheeks.
Yes, But Not Like This
I was delighted when I first saw ruddy ducks in the wild when we moved to Oregon. They were so different from the ducks I was used to, tiny little things with the males decked out in a brilliant blue bill during the breeding season. My first attempts at photographing them were almost comical, the ducks were a long ways away so they were hardly visible in the pictures.
Undaunted by my early failures, I’ll photograph them every chance I get and am always delighted to find one at close range. Almost always — but not like this. While this male appears to be doing the backstroke, the reality was not so pleasant. It was struggling mightily just to swim around, listing heavily to one side and going in circles, so my first thought was that a leg had been caught by something from below. Sometimes it would roll completely over as it did here, and there was nothing obviously wrong with it.
I’m not sure if the problem was psychological or physical, but it was hard to watch, as the little duck was spending a lot of energy just to swim around and even just to keep its head above the water. It was still able to dive although it was impossible to tell how well it could swim underwater. I didn’t see it on my next visit to the refuge a week or two later, so I’m not sure if I just missed it, if the duck got better, or if it died on its own or at the hands of one of the bald eagles.
I hope your suffering was brief little one.
Wood Duck
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Magical Morning
This morning got off to a beautiful start. I made it to Ridgefield near sunrise (no easy feat for a night owl like myself) and started the day watching some male ruddy ducks in breeding plumage. I then continued on the auto tour until I came across two pairs of wood ducks in a quiet channel in the small forested section of the loop. It was spring and the males were being a little territorial, chasing each other a bit, but it was pretty mild compared to most territorial displays.
Mother nature’s morning show wasn’t quite over, however. I spent quite a bit of time watching these beautiful ducks, and after a while a pair of beavers swam up and started grooming themselves on the far bank. A little later I’d watch male cinnamon teals chasing each other about and also see a flock of white pelicans, an unusual sight in the Pacific northwest.
All in all, a magical morning.
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Gadwall
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Dabble Dabble Do
One way of classifying ducks is based on their feeding patterns. Diving ducks dive, completely submersing themselves as they feed on the plants or animals under the water’s surface. Dabbling ducks dabble, flicking up their backsides into the air, their heads submersed and grabbing at food in shallow waters, their large webbed feet gently paddling to keep the vertical pose.
The light of the setting sun hints at warmth, but the ice in the foreground tells the story. This dabbling drake was feeding on a cold winter’s evening, the movement of the ducks helping keep some channels open even though most of the water had frozen over.
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Water Water Eveywhere, I Think I’ll Have A Drink
One of the advantages of being a duck is that when you’re thirsty, all you have to do is drop your bill a couple of inches into the water. You can even drink mid-swim like this drake, taking a few sips while you paddle along, never missing a beat.
It’s not apparent from the picture, but on this day drinking while swimming wasn’t quite as easy as it normally is. A cold snap had frozen much of the water on the refuge, with this narrow channel partially thawed. Swimming ducks helped keep it open, aided by the warmth of the suns rays.
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C-c-c-c-cold!
It might seem like it’s too cold for this drake to keep both of his feet on the ice, but it was actually just walking across the frozen channel. That’s not to say he couldn’t keep just one foot on the ground if he wanted to — like most birds, gadwall can stand on one foot for as long as they want, with the other leg safely (and warmly) pulled up under the feathers and against the body.
I didn’t quite capture the gadwall’s stride the way I would have liked, but I like how the ice looks so dark in the light of the setting sun. This picture was taken in the same channel as the picture below, but at very different times of the year.
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A Shy Friend
It took me a while to warm to the gadwall. While most male ducks are brightly colored, the gadwall is fairly subdued. They are a little shy and not seen in large numbers around here, so I didn’t take much notice of them. But they’ve really grown on me over the years and now I always feel a little delight in seeing one swimming in some quiet channel. While shy, they don’t spook as easily as wood ducks, so they are easier to observe (and photograph).
This drake was slowly paddling, you can see duckweed covering its breast and the narrow trail through the duckweed where it has been swimming.
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Off Color, Gadwall-style
I met this gadwall drake feeding in the shallows of Long Lake in May, right as he was transitioning into his nonbreeding plumage. Different duck species transition at different times, a fact it took me way too many years to realize. Even in his plainest dress he's still a beautiful creature, don't you think?
Cackling Goose
Coming soon …
Canada Goose
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Black & White
Though the most common race of Canada goose is so prevalent that it has become a nuisance in some areas, I love the beautiful black and white pattern of the goose’s face. Despite the mess they make of the sidewalks, I even like the small flock that hangs around in the grassy areas at work, as they provide a reminder that no matter how my day is going there is beauty just outside my cubicle walls.
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Harbinger of Spring
The sight of the year’s first goslings is a sure sign that spring has arrived. This lone gosling was the only offspring of a pair of geese at the River ‘S’ Unit. I don’t know if the others hadn’t hatched or if they had died in one way or another, but its parents kept a watchful eye on it and it swam tucked in close between the two of them when they moved about on the water. Here, they let it browse in the grass not long after sunrise.
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Snow Goose
Quick Stop
You have to be both quick and lucky to see a snow goose at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge, as they only stay over for a short time on their way to or from their wintering grounds. The plumage of snow geese varies, these birds are both of the white phase variety, the first is an adult swimming in shallow waters and the second is a juvenile feeding nearby.
Mallard
The Wilder Side
I've tried many times to get a decent picture of mallards at Ridgefield, but these are truly wild birds and very shy compared to their tamer relations in the duck ponds of the city. When I saw this drake appropriately resting on Rest Lake, I loved the reflection and settled in to watch. After a little while I got an even better picture when it hopped up to take a drink.
Common Merganser
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Female Commoner
A female common merganser swims while fishing in Rest Lake along the auto tour in the River S Unit. She was hanging out with several other females with no male in sight.
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Hooded Merganser
Crest
Hooded mergansers are almost too beautiful for words, particularly the males. These shy ducks have a crest that can be raised (as seen here), lowered like normal, or even flattened back against their heads when they get ready to dive.
Mirror
Hoodies are stunning creatures, especially the males. They're one of those birds that I see more often than I photograph. A handful of them winter on a creek near where I work, although they usually are not visible from where I walk. It's not the most photogenic location, so I don't photograph them there, but I always love seeing them. These mergansers were hanging out in quiet channels at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge. The first bird was preening and the rocking motion of his body disrupted the mirror-like surface of the water.
