Niagara River Duck Lunation

Lunation: Diving Ducks Muster on the River
(March 2, 2008)

Sunday afternoon, high overcast, about 30 degrees, no wind: My son Taylor and I walk the breakwall from Squaw Island out well past the Peace Bridge to a point where the ice build up blocks our progress. Great slabs of ice have piled up along both sides of the breakwall and out into the upper Niagara rapids, making islands and protected pools where thousands of ducks and gulls are resting or fishing.

Stretching across the river all the way to Canada, whole colonies have sorted themselves by species into separate cold water countries defined by harbor walls and ice spits. They are mainly members of the large and various family of diving ducks, well suited to the deep, fast waters of Niagara.

Scaup, the males as black and white as saddle shoes, are the most common and the most active. They seem to be paired up already and they ride the river like a carnival ride, roller coasting backwards downstream, then flying back up to where they started: a continuing elliptical movement with a bit of diving in between. A brown-backed female is paused on the water, a fish tail wiggling in her bill. At last she stretches her neck and swallows it whole.

Canvasbacks, their big reddish-brown heads wing-tucked, rest in a backwater in one long line, as evenly spaced as beads on a string. They seem to share an exact sense of personal space.

Common goldeneye are present as are the small but beautiful buffleheads, the males mostly white with their great round heads sporting patches of mallard purple and green.

They remind me of the hooded merganser we saw three weeks ago on a sub-zero February day farther down river at the mouth of Tonawanda Creek. He was diving with two red-crested females around the old turnstile bridge pilings. They were so shy they flew off as soon as they saw us, but not before we got a good look at the male’s fully raised circular crest, a yin-yang mandala of black and white feathers half the size of his black and fox-brown body. Vat a duck! First herald of the circus that’s come to town.

Amazing to think this scene has been repeated for millennia at this place where lake meets river and the river turns north, the same way most of these ducks are heading in their annual spring migration.