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.