If you ask any Midwestern birder to identify their favorite bird watching season, they will likely exclaim “Spring!” During spring migration new birds arrive in multiple waves and several factors make them more conspicuous and easier to identify than at other times of the year: they are famished from their long migration and bopping around madly trying to find food, canopy-dwelling birds are easier to see because trees and shrubs have not yet leafed out fully, and males are in full breeding plumage and often singing profusely. At many bird watching hotspots in Minnesota, there are 2-10 times more bird watching checklists submitted to eBird during May than during any other month of the year.

But hard-core birders aren’t content to simply go birding in May; they want action (and new species!) the year round. In northern regions, winter birding can be difficult, because most bird species have migrated to warmer climates. According to eBird data for Minnesota, there are only 22 species that birders have a 5% or greater chance of seeing during any given January bird-watching trip (the White-breasted Nuthatch tops the list), versus 94 species during any given May bird-watching trip (the American Robin tops the list). But going on a 2-hour-long winter birding expedition to observe a Downy Woodpecker, two Black-capped Chickadees, and a White-breasted Nuthatch can seem a little boring, especially if you’ve already observed these species dozens of times earlier in the year. So during winter, the spice of life for Midwestern birders typically comes from so-called “rarities,” species that show up outside of their normal geographic ranges. In the Upper Midwest, rarities often include irruptions of boreal species such as Common Redpolls or Snowy Owls, or more reliably, from “weird ducks.” Cartoonist Rosemary Mosco has aptly described winter birding as “Weird Duck Time.”

The winter of 2023-24 has been a relatively quiet one for boreal finches and owls, but it has been incredible for “weird ducks.” In my own birding hood in Washington County, MN, I’ve been able to observe all 3 species of scoters (Black, White-winged, and Surf), as well as the Long-tailed Duck, and I’m still hoping for a Harlequin Duck or Barrow’s Goldeneye. Taxonomically, these species are all part of the “sea duck” tribe of waterfowl, which acknowledges that they are usually found wintering in marine environments along the Pacific or Atlantic coasts. The Great Lakes are large enough that they resemble inland freshwater seas and they regularly attract sea ducks, but sea ducks also show up occasionally on larger rivers and lakes throughout the Midwest, and when they do, they attract tremendous attention from the local birdwatching community. For example, when a male Long-tailed Duck showed up at the confluence of the Mississippi and St. Croix rivers this winter, more than 100 eBird checklists were submitted from various vantage points along the river. Given the location’s proximity to a state and county border line, and the Long-tailed Duck’s apparent nonchalance about swimming across these imaginary dotted lines, many birders were able to add it to several different checklists.

Rare winter ducks are showing up much more frequently on sites like eBird and Facebook, but does that mean they are more common, or are birders simply getting better at finding them? To answer this question, I reached out to Ben Douglas, who has found and shared the locations of more weird ducks than anyone else in my neck of the woods. While he acknowledged that the warmer winters we’ve experienced may play some role, he mostly attributes the increase in sightings to better birding equipment, including high-end spotting scopes and cameras with optical zoom lenses. In addition, the ability to share checklists through social media gives birders better knowledge on likely times and places to look for rarities. But birding isn’t just about equipment and technology, it also involves knowledge and skill, acquired from accumulated experience. When I asked Ben to share some of his tips for finding rare ducks, he noted that they are often by themselves on large bodies of water, avoiding larger flocks of more common species, so you should pay close attention to anything that’s off by itself, behaving like an odd duck, if you will—because chances are that it really is a weird winter duck. 

Fortunately, one needn’t own an expensive spotting scope or camera, or spend hours chasing down sea duck rarities, in order to appreciate the diversity of waterfowl. For me, it’s always a welcome sign of spring when large noisy flocks of migrant Canada Geese and Trumpeter Swans return north, joining the smaller numbers of hardy individuals that have been hanging around all winter. And every so often the flock will include tundra nesting species instead, less common species like Snow or White-fronted geese, or Tundra Swans. The diversity of ducks picks up tremendously too—in addition to the few stalwart flocks of Mallards and Common Goldeneyes that have been here all winter, spring signals the return of Wood Ducks, Blue-winged Teal, and Hooded Mergansers, plus a fair number of “not-quite-rare but not-exactly-common” species too, like Northern Pintails or Canvasbacks. And for these species, a simple pair of binoculars, along with a bird guide or smart phone app to help identify unfamiliar species, are all that one needs to appreciate weird duck time. After all, weirdness is in the eye of the beholder.

About the author

Todd Arnold has been appreciating weird and not-so-weird ducks for most of his life. He is currently a professor in Fisheries, Wildlife & Conservation Biology at the University of Minnesota, where he studies population dynamics of birds.