Wildlife Watching Wednesday: The Red-Breasted Merganser

By: Tom Berg

Of all the species of diving ducks in North America, the mergansers are arguably among the most interesting.  There are common mergansers, red-breasted mergansers and hooded mergansers.  A favorite of many birders is the red-breasted merganser.  These mergansers are quite handsome, and both the males and females have a crest of feathers on top of their heads that often makes them look like they are having a bad hair day!

Male red-breasted mergansers are mostly white, black and gray, with a very dark green (almost black) head and a bold white ring around their long neck.  They have a characteristically bright reddish-orange breast, which is likely how they got their name.  Their eye is bright red, as is their long beak and their webbed feet.  Like most female ducks, females of this species are much more drab in color than the males.  Females are mostly gray and brown, although they also have the reddish bill.

Red-breasted mergansers migrate through much of the United States and breed in the far north of Canada and Alaska.  They can be found in marshy areas in both freshwater and saltwater.  Some individuals breed as far south as northern Wisconsin and northern Michigan, but most of them make their nests much farther north.  After the breeding season they migrate back to the southern USA and Mexico.

The beak, or bill, of red-breasted mergansers is heavily serrated to help them catch and hold onto minnows and other small slippery fish.  Fish are their main source of food, and they eat various-sized fish from tiny minnows all the way up to fish of six inches in length.  Longer, narrower fish are easier for them to eat, since they must swallow their fish whole.  They also regularly eat crayfish that they catch when they dive down to the bottom of lakes and rivers.  In wetlands they often eat tadpoles, frogs and salamanders, too.

These ducks are excellent flyers and can fly at impressive speeds.  In fact, a red-breasted merganser was once recorded flying at 100 mph, which made it the fastest duck ever recorded.  Now that’s fast!

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