Wood Duck

About the Wood Duck

The drake Wood Duck might be the most extravagantly decorated bird in North America: an iridescent green-and-purple helmet of a crest, red eye, white chin-strap lines, chestnut breast spangled with white, and bronze-gold flanks, all fitted together like painted woodwork. The female is quietly elegant in gray-brown with a bold white teardrop around the eye.

True to the name, this is a duck of the woods. Wood Ducks haunt tree-lined creeks, cypress sloughs, beaver ponds, and swampy bottomland across the eastern half of Texas, where they perch comfortably in trees on clawed feet no other duck quite matches.

They are cavity nesters, laying eggs in natural tree hollows and nest boxes, sometimes thirty feet up. The payoff is one of nature's great scenes: day-old ducklings, weighing next to nothing, launching from the cavity mouth and bouncing harmlessly on the leaf litter before following their mother to water.

By the early 1900s overhunting and lost bottomland had the species in real trouble, but protection and a continent-wide nest box campaign brought it roaring back - one of American conservation's clearest wins, paddling through flooded Texas timber.