Redhead

About the Redhead

The Redhead is one of the handsomest ducks on Texas water - the drake carries a round chestnut-red head, black chest, and smooth gray body, with a blue-gray bill crossed by a black tip. Hens are warm plain brown with the same bill pattern. On the water the Redhead's steep forehead and rounded profile separate it from the sloping-headed Canvasback it so often rafts beside.

Redheads are diving ducks of open water, feeding on pondweeds, shoalgrass, and other aquatic plants along with some invertebrates. On the wintering grounds they are extraordinarily social, packing into rafts that can number in the tens of thousands, all diving and bobbing together.

The species has one of the strangest breeding strategies of any duck: many females lay some or all of their eggs in other ducks' nests - Canvasbacks are the favorite victims - a semi-parasitic habit unique in North American waterfowl. Their own nests are woven into prairie pothole bulrush over water.

Texas matters enormously to this species: the Laguna Madre, with its vast shoalgrass meadows, winters the great majority of North America's Redheads. Inland, flocks turn up on reservoirs statewide from late October through March, and a raft of Redheads glowing rust-and-gray in low winter light is one of the state's classic waterfowl sights.