You might not know it, but common goldeneyes are on the prowl. They’re out in icy waters, cavorting and splashing about in a quirky duck-dating ritual. The male, like a randy college student, does most of the strutting and gyrating. He’s a handsome duck on the make: clean white below, mostly black above, with a dark green head and a big white spot between the base of his bill and his golden eye.
One of his signature moves is the “head-throw-kick.” (He’s actually got two versions of this move: the “slow” head-throw-kick and the “fast” head-throw-kick.) In any event, while paddling around some females, he’ll first thrust his head forward and then whiplash it back, so that the nape of his neck touches his rump while his bill points skyward. He utters a weird, grating call and then, like a slingshot released, thrusts his head forward while kicking water outward with his feet.
It’s a genuine turn-on (even for those of us who aren’t female goldeneye). And it’s one of the many reasons to watch birds in winter.
Oh, sure, common loons have left our now-frozen ponds for the Atlantic. The rainbow warblers have dumped us for the tropics. And no longer does the hermit thrush tender his fluty, rising serenade that lingers in our woods like ethereal mist. Yet those same woods, and the fields and open waters of winter, hold similar delights for the bundled-up birdwatcher.
It all begins with the winter light. It’s abundant, enhanced by the snow cover and crystalline arctic air. Nothing makes a bird glow like the low, winter sun at your back. Take the bufflehead, for example, a close relative of the common goldeneye, with what appears at first to be a black head with a huge white patch behind the ears. Yet the winter sun cast upon that duck head exposes a mélange of iridescent purple and green feathers, like a 1960s black light revealing the psychedelic colors on a Jimi Hendrix wall poster.
Next are the leaves – the evil leaves (to some birdwatchers). They’re gone. No more fighting the foliage for views of songbirds. This is particularly good for beginners, who sometimes have trouble capturing looks at birds in the binoculars. This lack of cover also makes the birdwatcher more visible to birds, however, and nothing scares off a bird more effectively than sudden obvious movement on the part of the birdwatcher. The skilled birder moves slowly but deliberately, speaks in a low voice, and keeps a respectful distance – especially in winter.
Softwoods host a lot of songbird action in winter. Spruce, fir, pine, hemlock, and cedar offer birds cover from cold and wind and, for many species, an abundant food supply – insects and seeds from cones.
Take the golden-crowned kinglet. It’s a frenetic songbird, about four inches long, washed mostly in muted gray and olive, with a black stripe through the eye and a white eyebrow. It would be easy to snowshoe or ski past this bird during a winter outing. But dwell for a moment in the court of this king, and learn the secrets of his fiery crown.
Males put on the best show. Every so often, when he bows in your direction or hangs upside down to feed, the sun rises on this songbird’s head – an orange-and-yellow corona. It’s as if tiny flames and flares were erupting from the kinglet’s crown.
No New Englander is far from this little gem. But the show continues in other habitats. The lowlands of the Champlain Valley are winter killing fields – that is, if you happen to be a meadow vole. Red-tailed hawks, rough-legged hawks, and northern harriers spend the winter in good numbers hunting voles and other small mammals in the plains of Addison County, Vermont. Snowy owls, snow buntings, and Lapland longspurs sometimes join the show in this habitat that substitutes for their tundra homes farther north.
Back in the woods, marauding flocks of winter finches, most of them also visiting from the north, munch on our winter cone crop. A highlight is the parrot-like white-winged crossbill. Rather than meeting at a point, its bill crosses at the tip. The adaptation allows this finch to pry apart the scales of conifer cones and to extract seeds with its tongue.
Similarly, along the waterfronts, rare northern gull species sometimes join flocks of the more common ring-billed, herring, and great black-backed gulls. These winter visitors are ghosts from the artic, with names that convey icy-white appearances – glaucous gull, Iceland gull, ivory gull.
All the while, the common goldeneyes are just offshore, preparing to, well, to make more goldeneyes. Ducks don’t wait until spring for romance. Males and females are forming pair bonds right now. So grab the binoculars, get out, and begin a romance of your own with the good company of winter birds.