Running With Birds: Buffleheads are again, swimming within the chilly ocean waters off the coast of Ipswich

47

by Rebecca Pugh

If you might be working close to Pavillion Beach, watch the water for a flock of diving geese. Sometimes you see them, one after the other, giving a slight ahead leap and plunging head first underwater.

Unlike a number of aquatic birds, buffleheads preserve their wings tucked in when they’re underwater, and swim solely with their ft. They spend about half of their time beneath the floor of the ocean this time of 12 months.

Buffleheads are placing. With a black again, white physique on the males, and a gray-brown physique on the females, their faces are what make them straightforward to establish — white patch on the top of the males and a white cheek patch on the top of the females. Also, they bobble, arising from underwater with just a little bounce of their swim.

There are two sorts of geese: dabbling and diving. The dabbling geese forage near shore with their butts prominently upward. Diving geese, then again, swim beneath the floor of the water for intervals of time searching for meals. Buffleheads are of this second class. For this purpose, as you run by them, you must preserve your eyes open for them to see when they are going to resurface.

The buffleheads who spend their winters right here in Ipswich breed in Central Canada and Alberta. During the summers, in boreal forests close to inland ponds and waterways, they’re tree cavity nesters — primarily in northern flicker cavities. Because they’re so small, they’ll make the most of smallish nesting holes, and never get crowded out by larger geese who need larger holes.

They lay between 4 and seventeen eggs, cream or buff coloured, and hatch, like most geese, precociously, able to stroll to the water in a number of hours.

Unlike many geese, buffleheads are largely monogamous. They search out the identical nesting accomplice 12 months after 12 months.

When they take off and land on the water, typically their wings make a slapping sound.

Their name is a brief cuck-cuck, in the important thing of C, although they are typically quiet this time of 12 months.

These highly effective birds are settled right here for the winter, and might typically be discovered swimming with different geese. You may see a raft of them off the coast of the mainland right here in Ipswich, diving and consorting. If you might be fortunate and the solar is shining the proper means, you will note the shiny inexperienced and purple sheen on the male buffleheads.

Buffleheads have been in sharp decline till the Migratory Birds Convention in 1920 between the US and Canada. Today, duck searching is estimated to shoot between 200,000 and 250,000 buffleheads a 12 months, although the species as a complete is rising in inhabitants within the US and Canada. To shield buffleheads, duck hunters do effectively to talk up for old-growth boreal forests so their breeding grounds keep secure.

There is a fossil of a hen resembling a bufflehead in California relationship from the late Pliocene period (2 million years previous). These birds have been right here a very long time. So as you run previous them, give them just a little blessing and preserve working. You are in good firm.

These migratory geese, and also you by yourself working path are athletes, facet by facet, out and about within the chilly winter air.

---

Rebecca Pugh, creator of “Running with Birds,” is a storyteller, musician, chilly water swimmer, runner, hiker, and the minister at The First Church in Ipswich. Her academics are Harriet Tubman and Harriet Hemenway, Ornithologist Jim Berry, and her aunt Pam Goff. Her analysis begins with “All About Birds” on the Cornell Ornithological Labs.