BY HARRY WEEKES
As a recent empty-nester, I am just realizing the joys of the migration that is children returning home for Thanksgiving.
So it was that I found myself walking with Penelope around the Indian Creek Pond in the final days of November. Other migrants to these waters included a slew of ducks speckling every part of the pond. Black-capped chickadees and dark-eyed juncos flitted about the willows on the edge, and a belted kingfisher shook his shaggy crest on a branch above the cruising waterfowl.
We stopped at various points where I handed my binoculars to Penelope and identified birds through her eyes.
“What is the one with the little white spots running down its wings?”
Barrow’s goldeneye.
“What about the one with the white stripe around its bill and a kind of purply head?”
Ring-necked duck.
“Whoa! That one’s got an almost totally white body and a dark green head and a long, sharp beak.”
Common merganser. That’s the male.
We picked out the different ducks even as they swam away from us, keeping a consistent distance. As we approached the outlet, two birds flushed from near the dock.
“What are those?”
And there was just something different about them. How they flew. From where they flew. The flashes of color. The shapes of their wings and tails. The whistle their feathers made. An aggregate of field marks condensed in three seconds of take-off and then landing into a questioningly grunted, “Huh.”
In the binoculars, there was no mistaking—wood ducks. They tucked in with the mallards and the wigeons and bobbed around with the gadwalls.
A male wood duck is almost comically ornate, as though you gave a watercolor kit to a child and they simply went to town. If you saw this painting before the bird, you would say, “That’s beautiful. Not possible, but beautiful.” When you see the duck before you see the painting, you think, “Well, that’s not possible.”
Wood ducks look like a member of the Tragopans, that group of Asian mountain pheasants that is so bizarrely colored it’s hard to believe they are real. A male wood duck has green iridescence, purple iridescence, chestnut brown, orange, red, black, khaki, and it looks like someone took a white highlighter and drew lines on its face, body and wings.
Yet, wood ducks are North American, found elsewhere only by introduction.
Oh, and they nest in trees, so it’s not unheard of to see one perched in a branch over a body of water.
Yep, they are peculiar ducks, and here they were, swimming around and feeding in the Indian Creek Pond.
We returned from our walk, triumphant with our spotting.
Penelope couldn’t hold out—“Guess what we saw? Wood ducks.”
“How did you see those?” Hilary responded.
“I sniped ‘em,” was Penelope’s immediate reply.
I smiled, resisting the urge to talk about snipe. I’ll save that for the spring, when their migration brings them back to the fields. And, perhaps, my own little ducks will return then, too.
Harry Weekes is the founder and head of school at The Sage School in Hailey. This is his 53rd year in the Wood River Valley, where he lives with Hilary and two mini-Dachshunds. The baby members of their flock have now become adults—Georgia and Simon are fledging in North Carolina, and Penelope is fledging in Vermont.
