By BILL CHAISSON
Of a Feather
In the 1970s Newburgh Bay, a place in the Hudson River between the cities of Beacon and Newburgh that is about two miles wide, was filled with hundreds of diving ducks all winter long. There are broad shoals in the bay, square miles where the water is only six or eight feet deep. Although the water is silty and brown, some sunlight penetrates to the bottom and allows aquatic vegetation to take root and grow. The ducks eat this vegetation and the minute organisms that live amid it.
The Hudson is technically an estuary; the tide comes 170 miles up the river, where the river has been dammed. In contrast, the Connecticut River — the next large river up the coast from the Hudson — is a real river; it flows one way all the way down to Middletown, Connecticut and then is tidally influenced for 28 miles to its mouth on the Long Island Sound.
The Connecticut has been reduced to a series of ponds by several dams, so there are shoals and marshes along it that are good duck habitat as well. I haven’t spend a winter here yet, but I assume the Connecticut freezes over completely at some point. The Hudson rarely does. For one thing there are ocean-going vessels navigating it all the way up to Albany, so they or an icebreaker keeps a channel open. Also, the endless interaction of the tide and the push of the river’s current creates rips and eddies that tear up the ice in the lunar-driven rise and fall of the surface. So, the ducks can linger and feed through most or all of the winter.
Waterfowl migration is already underway … somewhere. Many species breed above the Arctic Circle or out on the northern plains of Canada, where winter is already on the way. (It should be noted that we may get our first frost around here this weekend and some trees are already turning color.) Soon we will hear the honk of geese flying south and see rafts of ducks collecting on the rivers and ponds.
Once upon a time the site of Canada geese flying through the sky in their dramatic V formations, calling steadily to one another, was a real thrill. Now that we have a resident population that fills public parks with droppings, not so much. When I lived in central New York we saw a lot more snow geese, which are still a real pleasure. Not only are they a striking sight — bright white with black wing tips against a blue sky — but their calls are higher pitched, fluty and two-noted, like some Baroque ensemble tuning up 1,000 feet overhead.
Duck hunting season starts on Oct. 2 in New Hampshire. The law includes all species of ducks, with the following restrictions: No more than 4 mallards (2 of which may be hens), 2 black ducks, 3 wood ducks, 2 pintail, 2 canvasbacks, 2 redheads, 2 scaup, and no more than 4 scoters, 4 eiders, or 4 long-tailed ducks. The harlequin duck season is closed.
Most of the ducks that I watched on the Hudson were canvasbacks. They are large, sleekly built divers with red heads and whitish backs that are indeed dappled with gray like damp canvas. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was looking at a sizable percentage of the entire population at the time. Over-hunting and poisoning by lead shot had reduced the numbers to several thousand. Canvasbacks are fond of an aquatic plant called Valisinera (so much so that their Latin name is Aythya valisinera), which apparently gives their meat a delightful taste, making them a popular target.
Harlequin ducks (which look like harlequin-clad jesters) are endangered on the East Coast, possibly due to habitat loss and mass death during oil spills. Consequently, hunting of this species is prohibited.
When you look at flocks of migrating ducks you will notice that there are too many males. The ratio of males to females is often over 10 to 1. The sex chromosomes in birds are the opposite of those in mammals; the males have a matched pair and the females have an X and Y. In mammals, the mismatch causes higher mortality in males in gestation and early infancy, and it apparently does the same in females. This gender ratio problem puts some populations in a precarious position when it comes to reproducing. As with the harlequin ducks, a single large oil spill may wipe out a significant portion of the population if they are all migrating together like the canvasbacks that I saw on the Hudson in the 1970s.
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