A few birds from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.
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Red Breasted Merganser:Red Breasted Merganser Payii or Payiq My son Steven and I were canoeing in late August on one of the clear water rivers near Marshall when he spotted a couple of ducks taking off. “Those look like loons, dad.” I checked with my binocs and identified them as Red-breasted mergansers. They take off almost exactly like loons with rapid wing beats, and it takes them a long time to get into the air compared to most other ducks because of their narrow wings (something referred to as high wing-loading). Farther down the river we came across a large flock of 8 young still with their mother. I told Steven she would soon leave them, however, because by now they were able to fend for themselves. But I’m ahead of myself. The story of the Red-breasted merganser begins in the second year of the female when she finds a mate on her wintering territory in North American Pacific coastal waters. During their migration flight north their pair bond strengthens and by the time they arrive in Alaska in late spring they are soon ready to settle down and begin nesting. Not before a very curious courtship ritual, however, when the male stretches his neck forward and upward, then abruptly dips it and the front of his body under the water. He then angles his head up out of the water with his bill wide open, exposing his handsome serrated orange bill and uttering a soft catlike yeeow. I have to smile at the impossibility of trying this pose myself, along with the call. This posturing doesn’t last for long, though, because the female by now has already selected and begun to build her nest in a sheltered spot on the ground usually near freshwater ponds or rivers. Her nest is a scooped out hole or simple depression, which she lines with vegetation and her own downy feathers. After a few more days you might find up to 13 olive-buff-colored eggs in her nest, and sometimes some of them may not be her own because females have been known to lay eggs in other merganser nests or even in the nests of other species of ducks. Their semi-colonial nesting behavior probably facilitates this. As soon as incubation begins the male makes himself scarce, meaning the female does all of the tedious work of brooding and protection of the nest from predators. And this lasts for 28-35 days! But within a day after all of the eggs hatch (and they hatch almost all at once) the young follow their mother to water where they begin to feed themselves. Quite often, in areas of high nest density, two or more broods will join and form a crèche, which is something akin to our day care where one or more females will tend all of the little ducks. When you see long strings of newly hatched downy young swimming in a line behind one of these females it’s just about the cutest thing you could ever experience during a canoe trip on a river. After a few weeks when the little downy ducklings begin to look more like their mother she takes off never to return, leaving them to finish growing to where they too can take flight, which is usually when they are about two months old. During their duckling stage they feed mostly on insects, although when they begin to mature they change to a diet that consists mostly of fish, plus some crustaceans, aquatic insects, worms, tadpoles and even frogs. Fishing is facilitated by the serrated edges of both upper and lower bill. They feed by diving and swimming underwater like loons. Sometimes they hunt cooperatively, with several birds lining up and driving schools of small fish into shallow water where they easily catch them without diving. That kind of cooperative behavior you don’t find among other duck species. Since mature mergansers are mostly fish eaters, they can hang around the rivers in the fall until they freeze over, which these days could be as late as October. The two Yupik names I have for the Red-breasted merganser are Payiq or Payii, which could be related to the sound the male makes during courtship. The scientific name Mergus serrator, means “the diver that saws,” referring to the backward-pointing serrations on the cutting edges of the bill (the “saw-teeth”). Its common name translates as “diving goose.” Other common names are: Common saw-bill, fish duck, Long Island Sheldrake, pheasant duck, red-breasted goosander, red breasted Sheldrake, saltwater Sheldrake, saw-bill, spring Sheldrake, shellbird, shelduck, sea robin, and fuzzyhead.  |
