Unlucky Duck, Wet Hawk

Birding quietly on the shore of Lake Erie, I saw a van pull up. The birders inside pulled out their optics and pointed them in my direction. Eek! I've had that happen before and it freaks me out. I mean, I'll check to see if I recognize someone, but I don't train my scope and binoculars on a person for more than a few seconds. They just kept looking and looking. 

I decided to move toward them, or at least out of the direct field of view, and was relieved to learn that they were looking at something else that, thanks to the docks, was below my field of view. 

I drove over and saw a large immature female Cooper's hawk flap up from the water's edge. 

She was disheveled and soaking wet. Which is a scary thing to be when it's 7 degrees, with a stiff north wind. You can freeze right to your perch if you're not careful. You have to keep moving.

I couldn't imagine that she had been bathing.

And sure enough the birders pointed me to the scene of an epic struggle, in which she had caught and held a greater scaup underwater until it drowned. Holy cow.

They said she got all wet because she kept trying to lift it out of the water. But it was too heavy for her and she eventually gave it up.

The hawk shook her plumage and left in a flurry of droplets. I felt bad for her. I hoped she'd get dry quickly.

I picked the adult drake up and was surprised at how heavy and dense it was for its size. And yet...I felt through the thick breast feathers and down to its keel, and was not surprised to find it severely emaciated, the breast muscles shrunken away from the bladelike keel bone. I doubt that a Cooper's hawk could subdue a greater scaup in good condition.

I laid the scaup out on a rock near where it had died, hoping that the hawk could return and dine on it there. It was a meal hard-won, and I hated to see the bird go hungry.

I looked at the asphalt at the lake's edge and was stunned to see patch after patch of feathers, pulled from the breasts of resting waterfowl who had gotten out of the water, laid down and frozen to the pavement. What a drag to have your coat torn off you in this weather, to have your breast exposed to the freezing water! No wonder there were so many birds dying all around.

It occurred to me that if I lived anywhere near Dunkirk Harbor, I would probably have a garage and basement full of baby wading pools and compromised ducks, geese and gulls. As I stood on the shore, I could feel the weird energy of all the birds' combined travail and suffering. It set up a fluttering in my heart, a sympathetic vibration, that imbued the entire experience with a tinge of sadness. I wanted to help them all, but I couldn't.

This is a place with its own energy, one of combined joy and loss--a clanging fracas of gulls and ducks, studded with elegiac signs of death and loss. When I'm in a place like this, I sometimes wish I could turn down the side of me that is so keenly aware of suffering. But if I could, I wouldn't be me anymore.

The Winter Gulls

In a tough winter, the cool big gulls from the Far North come down to our ever-so-slightly warmer climes to find open water and food. King of them all is the hulking glaucous gull, shown here absolutely dwarfing herring and ring-billed gulls. They can be larger than the great black-backed, and they have a distinctive look, with a big puffy head and, by proportion, a small-looking dark eye. 

They also have the grace to be nearly all white, even down to the primary flight feathers. So it's not tough to pick a glaucous gull, like this immature bird, out of a flock of sleeping herring and ring-billed gulls. Herring gulls have the red bill spot, while ring-bills have a black ring around the bill tip. The chocolatey gulls in this shot are young herrings. By this time of winter, young ring-bills, like the bird on the left edge of the photo, look much like adults, with a lot of gray mantle feathers showing. That's because a ring-bill is a two-year gull, while the herring takes four years to attain adult plumage. 

Every once in awhile, the glaucous gull would spread its wings and hop a few feet, then settle down again. Wow.

A few dozen birds over, an immature Iceland gull rested. It's dead center, with the black bill tip and the white primaries. Icelands are smaller than glaucous gulls, but their plumage is similar.

All around, rafts of diving ducks floated. Two beautiful drake white-winged scoters joined the greater scaup and common goldeneyes. I love the white eye crescent (actually feathers behind the eye, whose iris is also white). At a distance, it looks like they're winking at you.

A female common merganser arrows by. The clean white patch beneath her chin and the spotless breast, contrasting with a clear-cut sienna head, differentiates her from a red-breasted merganser. There were easily 1,000 common mergs in a single raft out there. Whoo.

I lucked into four long-tailed ducks in the two days I birded Dunkirk Harbor. This is as close as I could get. Two have hauled out onto the ice at the rear right of the photo. You can see their dark round cheek spots. I absolutely love combing through flocks of waterfowl, looking for the new and different.

I mentioned the abundance of death in my first post. When you get this many birds crowded into one spot, some of them are going to die. Disease and starvation take their toll. Some haul out and freeze right to the ice. It must be an awful way to go. When the temperatures hover around zero F for weeks at a time, somebody's going to die. 

I have heard recently that great black-backed gulls around Cape Cod have been observed this winter, holding diving ducks underwater until they drown, then eating them. This is probably slightly outside the normal GBBG foraging behavior, especially at the frequency with which it's being seen. But cultural trends travel like wildfire in birds. As a bird rehabilitator, I know that if you want to get a bird to do something, put its cage next to that of a bird who knows how to do it. Birds learn largely by copying what their neighbors are doing. This is why, in late summer, I'll see young scarlet tanagers, common yellowthroats and orioles (insectivores for the most part) coming in to investigate seed feeders, wondering if there's anything there for them. Everybody else seems to be finding food there. Let's give it a try.

With the number of birds freezing to the ice or dying from starvation here, I doubt this young great black-backed (black tail) or glaucous gull (mocha-white overall) had to drown the red-breasted merganser to get a meal. A herring gull picks at a dead shad in the next booth at the Macabre Cafe.

The glaucous gull dipped its merganser breast filet repeatedly in harbor water, then flew off with its prize.

Despite the death of the merganser, it made me feel good to see everybody eating on such a frigid day. I dug into a jar of almonds and thought about how nice it was to be in a heated metal capsule, swaddled in goosedown, eating almonds instead of frozen merganser. I remain in the thrall of birds, who have no such place to retreat, and routinely survive conditions that would kill me in a matter of minutes.