Wintering Ducks on Lake Congamond

Like any other pastime, birding has a few tools of the trade. One of them is the telescope, which is essential if you wish to get a clear look at water birds. Most of us concentrate on the songbirds in our yards when we first take up this hobby. All those ducks and sandpipers in the first half of the field guide seem less interesting. While leafing through the guide many years ago, I decided to ignore the ducks. Now I often depart before dawn with my telescope for a day long trip to the coast just to study them. It turns out that ducks are as varied and fascinating in their habits and appearances as landbirds.

Many of them nest in the forests and on the tundra of Canada and Alaska, and their flight line on the way from there to the wintering range on the Atlantic coast passes over us. They fly past us at night, but a few miscalculate the distance or the weather and find themselves tired and short of their target when morning comes. If there is a large lake near you, this is the time to visit, hoping to view these birds close-up.

The Congamond Lakes in Southwick are not used much by people this time of year despite being ringed with homes and cottages. Even the fishermen are few, especially on a weekday. In November and December on a cold early morning the steam rises from the surface as the water cools and obscures whatever may be swimming there.

Recently the middle of the largest pond was dotted with over a hundred dark forms, barely visible in the mist. Over half of them were black ducks, the true wild native duck of the northeast United States. Unlike their close cousins, the mallard, they are usually wary of man, especially these individuals, who had arrived here overnight from their wilderness homes in the northern forests. With them were over thirty tiny green-winged teals, also a duck of wild wooded marshes.

The next day it was cloudy, the pond was clear, the black ducks and teal were gone. In their place were two ducks that had flown a much greater distance. Both were sea ducks, one a white-winged scoter arrived from western Canada or Alaska, and the other an oldsquaw from north-central Canada. They were together, close to the shore and could not make a starker contrast. The scoter was a female, large and almost all black except for two pale smudges around and behind the eye, and the white wing patch that gives the species its name. It was the oldsquaw that intrigued me more, because I have always been partial to this spiffy little duck with the weird name.

The oldsquaw was also a female in winter plumage, the whitest individual I had ever seen. Though small, it was close and loomed large in the telescope, every feather groomed and placed to perfection. You have not seen the colors of a duck until you see one close up. Then even black and white take on a hue that can catch your breath. She was aware of my presence and was paddling furiously out to the middle of the lake, unwilling to take to the air just yet. The scoter was in her wake, and after reaching the center of the lake the oldsquaw suddenly did take wing and flew low over the surface and around the point out of sight, never to be seen again. The scoter remained and stayed in this corner of the lake for at least a week longer, rather unusual for this ocean loving species.

On two recent bird club trips to the coast we had seen the oldsquaw. At Plymouth beach several in their winter white were found beyond the surf along with hundreds of dark scoters. On another trip to Rhode Island we saw a male still in dark summer plumage so far out we thought at first it was a scoter. Only the best telescope at high power could show the details well enough.

Next week I will talk more about the oldsquaw, how it is by far the most abundant winter duck in Massachusetts waters, and how it got its odd name.