Dabblers versus Divers, and Why It Matters
Okay, so now we get into ducks specifically, and I want to teach you the one distinction that will do more for you than anything else in this whole class. Dabblers versus divers.
It sounds simple. It is simple. But it took me a whole winter to actually internalize it, so don't feel bad if it takes you a walk or two as well.
The basic idea
Ducks feed in one of two ways. Dabblers feed at the surface or just barely under it, tipping forward so their tail end sticks up in the air, like they're bowing to something underwater. You've seen this. Mallards do it constantly. Divers feed by actually going under, sometimes for a good while, and popping back up somewhere you weren't expecting.
That's the whole distinction. But once you know it, it changes how you watch the water, because you stop waiting for a bird to hold still and pose for you and you start watching what it's doing.
Why this matters more than color
I've said this before and I'll keep saying it because it's the thing I actually want you to leave this class with. Color lies in bad light, and 8am at the lake in January is nothing but bad light. Gray sky, gray water, everything backlit. But behavior doesn't lie. A duck that's tipping tail-up over and over is a dabbler. A duck that vanishes and comes up thirty feet away is a diver. You can tell that from a distance, in bad light, without your binoculars even fully focused.
This is the same principle as shape and movement beating color for the raptors, and it's the same principle from dance, honestly, reading a body before you read a face. You learn the pattern of how something moves and the identity kind of falls out of that for free.
What this looks like at home before you even get to the lake
Here's a practical thing you can do this week. Pull up some video, doesn't matter where, library computer, your phone, whatever you've got, and just watch ducks feed for five minutes. Don't try to identify species yet. Just sort what you're seeing into two piles: tipping up, or disappearing under. That's it. That's the whole exercise. You're training your eye to notice the behavior first, before you even worry about which duck it is.
Once you've got that sorted, here's how it plays out on the water:
Dabblers — mallards, teal, wigeon, gadwall, that whole crowd — tend to stay in the shallower water near the edges. They can spring straight up off the water into flight, no running start needed. If you see a duck just launch straight up like it startled itself, that's a dabbler.
Divers — canvasback, scaup, bufflehead, ring-necked duck — sit further out on the open water usually, and they need a running start across the surface to get airborne. Watch for that pattering takeoff. It looks a little undignified, honestly, like they're not sure they're going to make it. That's a diver.
The eagle that was a bag
I want to tell you something that happened to me, because I think it's a useful embarrassment. I once spent a solid twenty minutes telling my friend Leslie, very confidently, that I had spotted a bald eagle in a tree across the water. I described the white head. I described the posture. I was building a whole case. It was a plastic grocery bag caught in the branches, moving in the wind just enough to look alive.
Leslie brings this up regularly. As she should.
The reason I tell you this isn't just to make fun of myself, though that's part of it. It's that I was so locked onto one detail, color, the flash of white, that I never once asked what the thing was actually doing. A bag doesn't dabble. A bag doesn't dive. It just hangs there and flaps. If I'd been paying attention to behavior instead of getting excited about a white patch, I'd have caught myself in about four seconds instead of twenty minutes.
That's the whole lesson wrapped up in one dumb morning at the lake.
A word on patience here
Diving ducks especially will test you, because they disappear. You'll get your binoculars on a nice group of scaup and one after another they'll just go under, and you're left staring at empty water wondering if you imagined the whole thing. This is normal. Give it a second. They come back up. This is a good moment to practice standing still and not narrating, which I know I keep bringing up, but it's because it keeps being true.
One caution worth saying plainly: out on the ice edge, footing gets deceptive this time of year, especially near shore where it looks solid and isn't always. Stay on the trail, don't go testing the ice to get a closer look at a duck. No duck is worth a soaked boot at 20 degrees, and honestly, no duck is worth worse than that either.
Before next time
Before our next walk, try the five-minute video exercise, tipping versus disappearing, and see if you can sort a handful of ducks without knowing their names yet. That's really the whole skill.