Northern Pintail, tipped up

 

As always, click on the photo to enlarge

A Northern Pintail (Anas acuta) displays its ornate dorsal feathering while grubbing food from the shallows of a Lake Ontario bay. Its namesake tail protrudes beyond its wing tips.

A side view of the same bird. The pintail is perhaps our most handsome fowl, at least among the dabbling ducks, and is quite the hardy beast. Although we were surprised to see this one lingering in the shadows of Toronto, on the northern shore of Lake Ontario. Its duckmates were mostly Greater Scaup, Long-tailed Ducks, White-winged Scoters and other tough fowl that winter in northerly climes.

This bird seemed healthy, and he was quite active and flew well. But he was also the only pintail, and most of his brethren would be far south of here by December 14, when I made these images.

The mug shot photo of our protagonist. Such a good-looking duck, and to me, a highlight of spring migration. Pintails push hard on the edge of ice out, and as thaws open up marshes, even in late February, in come scores of these "sprigs". Perhaps the Ohio best Ohio migratory hotspots are the western Lake Erie marshes, and the Killbuck Valley/Funk Bottoms wetlands complexes in Wayne County. Sometimes many thousands of pintail can be seen in a day.

Northern Pintails

 

A drake Northern Pintail (Anas acuta) in golden post-dawn light. It was one of many pintails at Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge on January 27, 2023. It was a frosty morning and a crust of ice veneers the marsh. Ice and cold are nothing to these hardy ducks. Even though January is very much winter to most of us, I could sense the zugunruhe (restlessness) among the pintails. They're early migrants pushing north at the first opportunity, often on the heels of ice-out.

Drake pintails are exquisite animals, resplendent with chocolate head, plumose contour feathers, long tail streamer, and overall natty coloration and patterning. And that bill! It is bluish-gray and glossy, as if coated with fresh lacquer. The bill almost appears to be liquid, as if made from water.

A group of apparently headless pintail. This busy phalanx of feeding birds - ten hens and a drake, and many others nearby - were focused on stuffing themselves with aquatic plant matter.

A male pintail accompanies a quintet of hens. Many ducks, this species included, form pair bonds on the wintering grounds. By now, nearly a month after I made this shot, these ducks are likely already in transit to breeding grounds. Large numbers of pintails move through Ohio in spring migration, with especially notable concentrations in the Killbuck Valley of north-central Ohio. Hard to say where they'll end up. The pintail breeds on a broad front in North America, all the way north into Arctic regions, and across the breadth of Canada, Alaska, and the northernmost U.S. states.