If It Quacks Like a Duck and Walks Like a Duck...

By Karen Vail

Well, hate to burst your bubble, but some ducks don’t quack, and some ducks don’t actually “walk!” It was a glorious bluebird day for a stroll along the Yampa River to enjoy the spring bird arrivals frolicking in the river. The ducks are back! Watching ducks is so captivating; those are feeding along the edge, those are feeding around the rocks, some are just murmuring to each other, then a sudden “quack” breaks the conversation, that one just disappeared and that one – that on is mooning me!! Its little butt was sticking right up in the air! Ha!!

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Position on the water: Wow, that duck is riding low in the water – maybe it had a big lunch?? That must be a diving duck. With denser and more compact bodies, diving ducks tend to sit lower in the water. They squeeze their feathers against their body to force out any air allowing them to dive quickly to chase underwater prey. Their tails are most often not visible. Dabblers are loftier and float higher in the water which also makes their tails more visible.

About those wings: Diving ducks’ wings are more compact, allowing them to squeeze them tightly against their body while they are diving making them very streamlined. They use their big feet to propel themselves underwater. Dabblers have larger wings compared to its body weight, enabling it to fly slowly and land in small areas with precision.

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Autumn is typically when we see the largest numbers of migrating ducks but spring brings a few migrators heading north as well as ducks nesting in the area. All ducks are waterfowl, living their lives in and around water. They are split into two main groups, the dabblers and the divers. Watching them on the water clearly shows their differences; dabblers tip up with their butt remaining in the air and divers, well, dive – they disappear underwater. You can also tell them apart by the way they eat, look, fly and where they are found. Let’s do a comparison between the dabblers which include mallard, teal, northern shoveler, gadwall, and American widgeon, and diving ducks including bufflehead, canvasback, ruddy duck, redhead, ringnecked, common goldeneye, and mergansers.

Favored habitats: Of course, both types of ducks need water, but dabbling ducks favor shallower waters and more seasonal water supplies. Diving ducks prefer larger bodies of water like lakes, ponds, as well as slow moving river areas. Diving ducks found in freshwater are called pochards.

What they eat: To feed, dabblers merely tip over, mooning us in the process, and feed on insects (the bulk of their diet), algae and other water plants on or just below the surface. They also are seen on land feeding on seeds, insects and other vegetation. Small comb-like structures (they kind of look like teeth) along the inside of the bill called lamellae act like a sieve allowing the duck to separate and expel mud and water while keeping the seeds, insects, and other food. Diving ducks have a similar menu but go about obtaining it in a different way. They completely submerge themselves to nibble aquatic vegetation on the bottom or chase food such as small fish and insects. They can typically dive for 10 to 20 seconds, although they can stay under longer. Depending on what they are eating divers emerge in different places: a canvasback rooting up tubers dives straight down and emerges in the same place, a merganser chasing fish or insects comes up far, often 50 feet or more, from where it disappeared underwater. It’s always fun to see if you can guess where they will pop up! Diving ducks, because they are not filter feeders like dabbling ducks, have almost no lamellae on their bills, although mergansers, who specialize in catching fish, have long, narrow bills where the lamellae are sharply serrated.

Position of their legs: You will rarely see a diving duck walking on land, whereas dabblers are often seen wandering around noshing on grasses and insects. Diving ducks’ feet are larger and have a specialized hind toe to help propel them through the water (think swimming fins), and their stout legs are situated farther back on their body to help with forward motion through water. Walking on land is a clumsy affair for diving ducks. Dabbling ducks have their legs centered under their body allowing them to walk easily on land, with a trade-off that their swimming capabilities are reduced.

Flight and landing: A sudden scare on the water displays another dabbler/diver difference. Dabblers erupt straight up out of the water, whereas divers need a long runway to get lift off. Divers rearward placement of feet and compact wings means that more speed and power are needed to get airborne. When in the air, divers fly with rapid wing beats. They land with a long feet-first skid. Dabblers can drop effortlessly into a small pond.

Nesting: Most dabbling ducks prefer to nest in grasslands near wetlands. Diving ducks, because of their limited mobility occasionally nest away from water, but most make their nests on water on floating rafts of vegetation. Of course, nature does not follow fast and set rules, and mallards are often seen on floating rafts on water and scaups on grasses next to the water. Also, the ducks nesting in the grasslands have higher predation than those on the more inaccessible floating rafts. Even though more eggs and chicks are lost these ducks are more likely to renest again and again during the summer.

Oooh that bling: It’s the dabblers that like to show off. Compared to the rather drab diving ducks, dabblers have colorful speculum, a patch on the secondary flight feathers, which are the feathers at the trailing edge of the wing, closest to the body. The speculum color is distinctive and can easily be seen in flight, and often seen on swimming or standing birds.

And about that quack! Only the females make a loud quack sound (amongst many other sounds), while the males have a raspy muffled call, or whistles, squeaks and honks.

Excuse me while I duck out for a walk. Quack!!