Birding Western Mass: Weird Ducks, Snow Geese, Hampshire Bird Club meeting
Thoughts on Birding from the Quabbin to the Berkshires
Study Up
“Weird duck season” is my favorite novel term for the time of year just passed. Rosemary Mosco, often featured in this newsletter, coined the term and The National Audubon Society amped it a couple years ago. There’s still time to catch a few such ducks. All are diving ducks, many live a meaningful portion of their lives at sea or in the boreal forests; we are likely to get more of them, says layman I, as global warming keeps more water here ice-free for longer.
To study the weird ducks, I’d suggest looking at the diving ducks that you don’t already know, with a strong focus on:
ducks with reddish heads — both are rare here now, so if you see a duck with a reddish head, you can get immediately pretty interested
redhead (rare) (blocky head)
canvasback (also rare) (slopy head)
ducks with puffy white marks on their heads
hooded mergansers (quite likely — look for the black border that makes the white part kind of wedgy, and look for them to erect that like a piece of sideways cream pie with chocolate crust [wait I’m a dessert genius now?] and then let they let the crest slump like a hipster beanie)
buffleheads (less likely — look for the absent black border, so it’s more like they really have a marshmallow glued to the back of their heads, which is fetching and jaunty)
sleek ducks that look like speedboats
red-breasted mergansers (less likely, so rule this one out first)
common mergansers (most likely one, solid colored head on males)
hooded mergansers (also really likely, poofy brownish crest on females a mercy)
scoters (there are three, for which I apologize, but it is not my doing)
black
white-winged (most likely right now, in December — and I had one in Long Island a week ago)
surf
harlequin ducks are really, really rare — one this year so far, very few ever in inland Massachusetts
eiders, don’t even, but if you see that sloping head, get careful with your glass
scaups (check the head color in the light)
lesser
greater
tufted duck
goldeneyes
common (which is, yes, somewhat common)
Barrow’s (not common — when you see the grape Nehi hue on the head, start marking other fieldmarks like the flank bubbles)
Also, it’s snow goose season. Because evolution and taxonomists don’t like you or me at all, blue geese and snow geese are both snow geese, but Ross’ goose is not. This is how we know that the logic of the eye is not the logic of the taxonomist. Enough said.
Watch for snow geese (which, again, may include blue geese, which are blue like nasty cheese is blue, not like the sky or a Slurpee is blue) in flocks or groups of other geese. I had a snow last weekend at Whiting Reservoir. It was hanging out with a handful of mute swans and some Canadas. When I spotted it, I immediately assumed “domestic goose that people will be gently chiding of me if I get excited,” which is a reflection for another day. But I remembered:
domestic geese are quite unusual at Whiting (maybe never seen one there)
snow geese are a thing right now
Whiting is not as frequently birded as many other bodies of water, such as the Quabbin and Ashley and the Berkshires ponds, because you cannot get to Whiting without walking a distance that makes it less fun to have a scope, so I am more often the first person to see a thing there.
The below gives you a sense of what’s up in terms of when snows are common. This is the abundance of snows over the last few years’ winters aggregated (with two megaweeks removed that made the results ugly and unreadable).
Focus
Sheltered ends of ponds are a key place to look now. When the wind starts up, finding a place in a body of water where the air and water are more still is a ticket to better luck. Use your binoculars even if you don’t see anything yet. Scan the sheltered space at the water level, and then move your glass so that you can also see the shore as well. The Iceland gull that has delighted many (including me) at the Holyoke dam was spending time in places where it could rest and store up warmth. That included a log, which while doubtless cold was possibly not as grim as a stone for thermodynamics. It also spent time on the apron downstream of the dam, which may well have been in the lee of the dam and so slightly warmer.
Birdscape
I don’t have a hotspot this week because I had to go out of town a bunch (birded Long Island; did not bird Moline, Illinois). Instead, maybe come to the Hampshire Bird Club meeting on Tuesday? I will be the last attraction in a veritable smorgasbord (you are welcome to insert a smorgasbird pun there; I will not) of short features. I’d like to tell club members about this newsletter, which is now quartered at birdwestmass.com, and get feedback about what you, dear reader, would like me to do more of. (If you want me to do less of something, please be aware that I will probably tell you just not to read what doesn’t interest you.)
Bird Books and Whistles
Birds in Winter is the best natural history book taking an international perspective on all birds that I have read yet. I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is matter-of-fact, evidence-based, and lacking all poetry. I don’t always want my books to lack poetry or lyrical inclination. Even Roger Tory Peterson sometimes has that kind of thing in his work (“sparrow dipped in raspberry juice”). But this book is absolutely, 100% genius, driven entirely by a thoughtful and comprehensive philosophy devoted to examining the question of what birds do when it is winter — where they go, what they eat, why they do it, what we don’t know and what we do. Its clarity and lack of passion in no way diminish the heroic work of feathered life in surviving.