You’re my favourite

People often ask me about my favorite bird. Though I’ll always be partial to my spark bird,  the red winged blackbird,  it seems that my favorite bird changes every time I go out birding.

When I started birding, waterfowl held very little appeal to me. A duck was just a duck. In fact, ducks are quite frustrating for the beginner birder. Not only are the females almost uniformly brownish-grey, but young males are also virtually indistinguishable from the females. To make matters worse, when ducks molt they look nothing like when they’re in breeding plumage.

Bufflehead duck © Tim Zurowski

And then I saw my first bufflehead and couldn’t take my eyes off the bird’s stark black and white plumage; the duck seemed dressed up for a flashy black-tie affair. When the sun shines on a bufflehead’s dark, rounded head with a large white patch in the back, the bird’s plumage give off an iridescent green and purple, slightly metallic hue. A magician of a duck.

Long-tailed duck © Missy Mandel

After the bufflehead, I fell for the long-tailed duck, with its delicately playful, forked tail sticking out at a forty-five degree angle. Then I couldn’t stop marveling at the common goldeneye. And then, of course, I was smitten by all three members of the remarkably coiffed merganser family (common, red-breasted and hooded); how the red-breasted merganser manages such a hip, spiked hairdo without an ounce of gel is beyond me.

This weekend, I saw my first wood duck at the LaSalle Marina in Burlington; the sighting catapulted the wood duck straight to the top of my favorite bird list. LaSalle Marina also happens to be one of the best places to get close-up views of waterfowl thanks to its protected areas (it’s also a favorite hotspot for bird photographers). I arrived to find the wood duck sleeping and from the back he resembled little more than a mallard, but with an extra ribbon of white adorning his neck. I didn’t think much of him, and kept my eyes on the gregarious coots trotting along the ice and pecking at birdseed like chickens; I couldn’t get enough of their disproportionately enormous feet. And then the wood duck awoke from its slumber and my world changed.

The duck looked like it had been painted, a masterpiece with crisp white lines delineating its features. The sun illuminated the wood duck’s extraordinary coloring and I spent a good fifteen minutes staring at the bird’s crisp metallic green head, purplish-chestnut breast littered with white polka dots, light brown sides and dark blue plumage on its back. The duck looked unreal to me; he resembled the work of a meticulous artist who had used her thinnest of brushes to paint razor sharp white lines that cut through the duck’s face.

Who knows what’ll happen once the warblers arrive a few months from now, and I reacquaint myself with the jaw-dropping black and white warbler or the magnificent magnolia warbler. But for now, 2013 is all about the wood duck.

Julia Zarankin is a writer, editor, and former professor of Russian literature and culture at the University of Missouri. She's a long-time contributor to ON Nature magazine and our blog.