Large, beautiful duck
Some birds I would write about only in the spring or summer, because that’s the only time they are here. Some species winter here and breed elsewhere. The common merganser is one of those North Idaho species that is here year-round. It’s big and beautiful, but it’s taken for granted, and I think that it often loses out because of its unimaginative name.
Its cousins, the coast-dwelling red-breasted merganser and the diminutive hooded merganser, have names that give you an immediate mental picture of the duck – something about it to watch for. “Common,” as a name, elicits images of pigeons or starlings and makes it sound ordinary and plain. It is neither, however.
It is, in fact, our largest duck; larger than some geese. The British call it a goose: goosander, and its scientific name, Mergus merganser, means diving goose in Latin. So you can see, and as has often been my theme, this poor bird needs a new name.
Looking through one Common Name Index, I found 10 common names with “common” as a part of the common name. And not a one was common in the commoner or pigeon sense. But as is the case with the common merganser, birds which have a wide distribution or are found in large numbers are often stuck with common as a name.
Under the category of abundance in field guides, the common mergansers is listed as common throughout the United States and Canada. It breeds throughout Canada and Alaska, winters throughout the United States except for the southeastern states, and is found year-round in the Northeast and the Northwest. So certainly it is common in that sense.
But so are red-winged blackbirds – a name full of poetry. Do you want to call them common blackbirds?
The common merganser is just as common in northern Eurasia, giving it what’s called a Holarctic distribution. Nearctic would be just North America and Palearctic is just Eurasia – just north of the tropics in both cases. So in the geographic sense it is also common.
But the raven has a very similar Holarctic distribution – and a name actually in poetry. Should we call a bird with such size and such black, shiny beauty, such roots in myth and modern-day storytelling, the “common raven?” Oh, we do. Never mind. But in literature it’s just called the “raven.”
Our duck, however, has many other characteristics that would be better suited to a name if the powers-that-be require a descriptive name. As I mentioned before, its Latin name means diving goose.
The goose part is due to its size. It’s not as chunky as a goose, so doesn’t look all that large on the water and from a distance, but it is long. Brant and cackling geese are the same length and Ross’s goose is shorter. The diving part comes from its hunting habits. These large mergansers are almost strictly fish eaters and they don’t wait for the fish to come to them in the way of a heron or egret.
The ducklike birds of the world, the family Anatidae, are divided into seven relatively easy to recognize groups. The swans and geese are easy, right? The whistling-ducks are not around here – they are tropical, but they are either ducklike geese or geeselike ducks, depending upon your point of view.
Then there are four groups of actual ducks. The most commonly thought of – there is that darn word again – are the dabbling ducks. The mallard is a common example, both numerically and distributionally.
The second duck group is that of the bay ducks, the pochards. Now pochard is a great name, just as merganser is a great name. There is no bay duck named “common pochard” – well, there is no North American common pochard. Northern Europe has a common pochard, but it was originally just called pochard. Here we have the redhead, the canvasback, the ring-necked duck, the greater and lesser scaup as examples. Those are all great names, except ring-necked, which makes no sense to me – there is no ring that I have ever seen on its neck, but is has a nicely ringed bill. Yes, bird names need a lot of work.
A third group of ducks is the stiff-tails. The ruddy duck – another perfect name – is our only local example. By the way, stiff-tail males have a beak so powder blue that it looks fake. My first view of a ruddy duck left my mouth hanging open and me muttering “I’ll be … .”
The last group includes the sea ducks and mergansers. This group has some really great names: spectacled eider – it really looks to be wearing feathered glasses; king eider – actually it’s face begs for it to be called clown eider; harlequin duck – it’s name actually means clown; three scoters – scoter means nothing at all but sounds so cool; two goldeneyes – guess what color their eyes are; and the bufflehead – a name as well as a bird that always brings a smile.
As I mentioned before, the other two mergansers have decent names. Red-breasted merganser is descriptive – of the male, about half the year. Hooded merganser is also descriptive, and cleverly so. And don’t even get me started on the Eurasian merganser, the smew. What a name!
So what common low-life was so unimaginative that he had to name a large, beautiful, and distinctive bird “common?” The male is long and sleek in the water, like a wooden speedboat of years gone by. Its back and wings are flat black, its sides are bright white to the waterline, and it can be pinkish below as if painted to prevent barnacles. Its head is smoothly rounded and iridescent green. Its beak is slim and tapering, like an elegant cigarette holder from the ‘30s and ‘40s, and is a stunning orangish-red.
The female is similarly sleek in the water, but with a Lucille Ball-colored Woody Woodpecker hairdo (featherdo). Its grayish back is silvery in the sun, or disappears into the watery murk on an overcast or stormy day. Then, its likewise stunning bill and its sharply contrasting white chin and chest are your clues to identity.
When either sex flies, you get a sense of the enormity of its duck size, yet it remains sleek and powerful – like a fighter-bomber. So you see, there is nothing common about its appearance. Similarly, there is nothing common about its biology.
Birds don’t have teeth, but mergansers come closest. Dabbling ducks have beaks with lamellae of comblike structure for straining food out of the water they take in. Scoters have a hard, stout beak for pulling crustaceans off of ocean rocks. But mergansers have beak lamellae with numerous, sharp, toothlike points for holding the fish that make up the vast majority of their diet.
A common merganser can take uncommonly-sized bird food in the form of fish up to a foot long. Thus it is well suited to the large lakes of North Idaho where it dives deep and strong for its prey. Red-breasted mergansers prefer the marine environment and the much smaller hooded merganser prefers shallow edges.
In winter, common mergansers form large flocks on the lakes, and in the spring pairs disperse to woodland edges to nest in tree cavities, holes in banks, or in boulder-clefts. Up to a dozen ducklings are hatched per nest; common mergansers are monogamous, but they are also, as is the case with a bunch of other ducks, nest parasites, so ducklings aren’t all necessarily of the same parentage.
Nobody seems to care, however, and ducklings are well taken care of, even if they are little red-headed stepducklings. They start right off finding their own food – aquatic insects initially – and quickly move up to small fish, mussels, and even salamanders.
The young first learn the art of diving for their dinner, but are flying and on their own by five weeks. Because common mergansers are built for diving, they aren’t the best at take-offs. When frightened, they’ll usually choose to dive, but when they do take to the air, they’ll first skitter across the water’s surface for a long distance, as if walking on water, to gather airspeed. Once airborne, however, they are again elegant, and not the least common.
Well, I like the British names for lots of things better than our Americanizations. And that’s especially true in the case of the common merganser. Let’s get a petition or something going to restore the Old World name and call it the goosander. Then, if you want to Americanize that, you can call it the goo-sander.