Lakeside Living 7: Duck Seasons ~ by Ruth Ross Saucier

When you live on a lake you find yourself telling the seasons and predicting weather in more natural ways.  The house faced the lake (SSE), so when the wind began blowing off the lake toward the house, we knew bad weather was on its way, no matter what the weather station or the meteorologists said. When the wind shifted a change was coming; and when it finally blew from the back yard down the lake, we knew the weather was guaranteed fair. Somehow wind direction is always clearer when you can see it moving on the water.

Recognizing a change in seasons became easy once we learned to read several indicators. Frog song changed across spring into summer. While it began with tiny high-pitched frenetic sound, it eventually deepened to big belching “jug o’ rum” calls by mid-August: a song that was guaranteed to drive away sleep, since bullfrogs have absolutely NO sense of rhythm.  But the best indicator of the advent of winter and spring were ducks.

Normal lake life in Washington state is populated by your basic mallard, the home team duck, who lives here year-round and announces spring by producing  loads of babies.  Baby ducks are fodder for everything else in the animal kingdom; locally common predators include bass, eagles, osprey, and anything hungry enough to think that a two-ounce ball of fluff makes a good snack. When you

Mallard ducklings with good mama.

see ducklings daily, though, you also recognize who is a good mama duck, and who is shell-shocked (pun intended) over having little ones trailing around behind them. The babies whose mama watches their every paddle will have a higher survival rate by far; but the babies who are little alpha wanderers, paddling off to see the world with no regard for where mama is, will be the first to be culled from the flock.

The ducks that migrate through are the ones that tell you when winter has arrived and when it finally leaves.  Washington state is on a flyway for hundreds of bird species that migrate between Alaska and Mexico, but we knew to watch for buffleheads. 

Buffleheads are the clowns of the duck world, the smallest diving duck in North America, and they spend their summers in the Arctic.  When it gets a little chilly there, they migrate south to Washington, where their appearance is the sure sign that winter has arrived.  And as long as they lounge around, winter still haunts the lake. Spring may flirt with you, but it never comes to stay until the last bufflehead wings north for a summer stay in the balmy arctic.

The best time comes when the lake first begins to thaw, because the top water melts first.  Underneath maybe an inch of free water, the ice lingers and the ducks walk…on water.  Or, they land with great confusion careening across the ice with complete lack of control.     Duck on Icy Landing Approach