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Mergansers on the move

It’s not too early for swimming at Six Mile Creek. Betsy Bloom Photo

As with high school sports, this is kind of the slow time between seasons. The lakes still are locked in ice, leaving little open water for early waterfowl or shorebird migrants to stick around.

I did see a sandhill crane fly over Randville Grill while headed to Iron Mountain on Wednesday, and Friday morning got a photo of a pair of Canada geese and little group of hooded mergansers from the bridge over in Six Mile Creek.

It was quite a contrast, the more stately, sedate geese with the flashy, busy mergansers.

The little fish-eating ducks were in fine courting form, the males throwing their heads back and fanning out the crests that give them their name. The females did not appear particularly impressed.

The mergansers, hooded and common, often are among the first birds to return to Six Mile Lake each year, wooing partners in the scant strips of water along the lakeshore and where Solberg Lake Creek feeds in, which is just off our property.

While the common mergansers will move on, hooded mergansers do nest here, in much the same way as wood ducks — they like tree cavities and will use nesting boxes if available. I saw a television program that showed a merganser and wood duck hen sharing a nest box, though the wood duck seemed none too happy about it.

The species also has been known to lay eggs in another hooded merganser’s nest, leaving them to be raised by the other female, a practice that’s called “brood parasitism,” according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Like the wood ducks, hooded merganser ducklings will vault out of the nest cavity or box within a day of hatching, using stubby wings and spread webbed feet to slow the fall and make a soft landing, then letting mom lead them to water.

Their diet of fish, crayfish and amphibians means hooded mergansers don’t make good eating. Hunters sometimes will target them as a bird worth having mounted, but often they’re an accidental or incidental take.

Though hunting pressure once was a factor in the early 20th century, hooded mergansers are thought to have increased their numbers in the past 50 years, according to Cornell.

It’s a fun species to see at Six Mile Lake and, usually, a sign the pace of migration should pick up soon.

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