{"id":21771,"date":"2024-12-11T00:30:02","date_gmt":"2024-12-11T07:30:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/?p=21771"},"modified":"2024-12-09T14:04:41","modified_gmt":"2024-12-09T21:04:41","slug":"wood-ducks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/2024\/12\/11\/wood-ducks\/","title":{"rendered":"Wood Ducks"},"content":{"rendered":"

BY HARRY WEEKES<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

As a recent empty-nester, I am just realizing the joys of the migration that is children returning home for Thanksgiving.<\/p>\n

So it was that I found myself walking with Penelope around the Indian Creek Pond in the final days of November.\u00a0 <\/span>Other migrants to these waters included a slew of ducks speckling every part of the pond.\u00a0 <\/span>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.<\/p>\n

We stopped at various points where I handed my binoculars to Penelope and identified birds through her eyes.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is the one with the little white spots running down its wings?\u201d<\/p>\n

Barrow\u2019s goldeneye.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat about the one with the white stripe around its bill and a kind of purply head?\u201d<\/p>\n

Ring-necked duck.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhoa! That one\u2019s got an almost totally white body and a dark green head and a long, sharp beak.\u201d<\/p>\n

Common merganser. That\u2019s the male.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat are those?\u201d<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 <\/span>The whistle their feathers made. An aggregate of field marks condensed in three seconds of take-off and then landing into a questioningly grunted, \u201cHuh.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the binoculars, there was no mistaking\u2014wood ducks. They tucked in with the mallards and the wigeons and bobbed around with the gadwalls.<\/p>\n

A male wood duck is almost comically ornate, as though you gave a watercolor kit to a child and they simply went to town.\u00a0 <\/span>If you saw this painting before the bird, you would say, \u201cThat\u2019s beautiful.\u00a0 <\/span>Not possible, but beautiful.\u201d When you see the duck before you see the painting, you think, \u201cWell, that\u2019s not possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wood ducks look like a member of the Tragopans, that group of Asian mountain pheasants that is so bizarrely colored it\u2019s hard to believe they are real.\u00a0 <\/span>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.<\/p>\n

Yet, wood ducks are North American, found elsewhere only by introduction.<\/p>\n

Oh, and they nest in trees, so it\u2019s not unheard of to see one perched in a branch over a body of water.<\/p>\n

Yep, they are peculiar ducks, and here they were, swimming around and feeding in the Indian Creek Pond.<\/p>\n

We returned from our walk, triumphant with our spotting.<\/p>\n

Penelope couldn\u2019t hold out\u2014\u201cGuess what we saw? Wood ducks.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow did you see those?\u201d Hilary responded.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI sniped \u2018em,\u201d was Penelope\u2019s immediate reply.<\/p>\n

I smiled, resisting the urge to talk about snipe.\u00a0 <\/span>I\u2019ll save that for the spring, when their migration brings them back to the fields.\u00a0 <\/span>And, perhaps, my own little ducks will return then, too.<\/p>\n

Harry Weekes is the founder and head of school at The Sage School in Hailey.\u00a0 <\/span>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\u2014Georgia and Simon are fledging in North Carolina, and Penelope is fledging in Vermont.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 Other migrants to these waters included a slew of ducks speckling […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21772,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","_pvb_checkbox_block_on_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,74,34],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-21771","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-commentary","8":"category-education","9":"category-science-place"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21771"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21773,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21771\/revisions\/21773"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}