A Vagrant Garganey at Plum Island

Henry David Thoreau wrote that one should "Beware all enterprises that require new clothes." That admonition has always appealed to me because new clothes also meant formal and uncomfortable clothes. Now comfort and casual are what sells new attire, and Saint Henry's words have lost their bite.

Although you may not believe that clothes define the man, feathers certainly do define the bird. Modern fabrics still cannot match the feather as the perfect adornment. However, even feathers do eventually wear out and must be replaced once or twice a year.

When the breeding season is over, all birds have a respite from the labors of nesting or migration. This is when the new feathers grow, pushing the old worn ones aside to loosen and fall like leaves from a tree. This amazing process is called molting.

For most songbirds this happens gradually over several weeks and in a certain sequence that allows the bird to keep mostly feathered and flying at all times. This new plumage is complete by late summer or early fall and often the colors of the new feathers are different and duller than the old ones. These dull colors are retained through most of the next 6-8 months and are called the 'basic' plumage.

As the edges of the feathers wear, brighter colors are revealed in the males of many songbirds, and in spring we and the females get to be dazzled by the splendor of the male breeding colors, boringly called the 'alternate' plumage. Those bright feathers are usually not new ones at all, but just an alternate, worn appearance of old feathers.

Ducks are different, for twice a year most of them go through 'synchronous molts,' which means most of their old feathers are lost at once, rendering them unable to fly. Fortunately, they can still swim, and spend the two or three weeks of plucked vulnerability hidden in the dense marsh vegetation.

After breeding, both male and female ducks don nearly the same dull colors the female wears year-round. It is called the 'eclipse' plumage, because the beauty of the male's breeding dress is completely lost until a second molt several months later.

For those who want to identify the ducks they see, this eclipse plumage can be difficult, especially for the largest family of paddling ducks (Latin anas). The anas family of ducks are closely related, and all species take on a similar mottled or blotchy body image when in eclipse.

Here in New England, the most common and familiar anas duck is the mallard, but there are six species that occur every year. Worldwide, there are dozens of members of the anas family, and one of them is named after a region of southern Switzerland, the garganey.

Though abundant in Europe and Asia, the garganey is very rare on this continent. There were only three sightings in Massachusetts until one was reported recently on Plum Island at the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge in Newburyport.

As nine members of the Allen Bird Club made a special trip to view this rare duck, we debated whether we could easily distinguish it from other dabblers, since it was in eclipse plumage. It had completed its molt and could fly, so we also had to be concerned about whether it would wander to another inaccessible part of the huge marshlands.

It could even leave as it had come at any moment, perhaps from Europe by way of Iceland and on to who knew where. The garganey has a strong instinct for migration, traveling the long route between the breeding grounds of central Eurasia and the wintering areas in Africa and southern Asia.

The garganey was grazing the surface of the shallow pools for insects and seeds with a dozen or more black ducks and gadwalls. It was no problem noting the special features of the bird's plumage, the dark head cap, the line through the eye, the white throat, the overall paleness, and the gray wing patch when it stretched and preened those new feathers.

This bird was thought to be a male, and we could only imagine the bold white teardrop shaped eyebrow and the reddish face that once adorned him as he raised a family somewhere in the vast continent on the other side of the wide Atlantic.

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