Merganser Whisperer

As anyone who has been following along with this behind the scenes blog knows, I have spent my winter tortured by hooded mergansers. Or - the lack of hooded mergansers.

Recap: as I was researching my tranche of winter episodes, I locked onto a great story I could tell about them. Not only that, before I’d even chosen that story, I had caught a small flock of them on camera at Leslie St Spit. If they were so plentiful and available that I was getting footage of them without even meaning to, well, this would be a piece of cake, right?

They wound up being the only hooded mergansers I would see for months. And months. And months.

Presumably that little flock I saw was gearing up for migration. I don’t know if this is true, but it seems like hooded mergansers are much more liable to head south than the other species we have in Ontario. 

I headed back out over and over as the weather turned, convinced that I’d find more somewhere. Winter can often be a benefit for catching waterfowl as it tends to funnel them into smaller and smaller areas of open water as most of it ices over.

But no. No hooded mergansers anywhere. Worse: I was so fixated on getting footage of them that I managed to pull a complete misidentification. I kept thinking I was seeing them out in Lake Ontario, either on the Spit or nearby Ashbridges Bay. They were mergansers. And they had… something like a hood, kind of. Sort of. They were a bit far out in the water, and the footage I was getting was a bit boring: just a duck against featureless water. But I thought I was capturing the right species, at least.

Nope - I had never heard of the third species of merganser we have in Ontario (besides common and hooded), red-breasted mergansers. Every single one I had seen (I know because I checked every piece of footage desperately) was the wrong species. 

I rewrote the episode a bit to account for this. I wrote a blog post admitting how dumb I’d been. I kept going out looking for hooded mergansers.

As we moved into April I was much more aggressive, returning to Leslie St Spit as often as possible, to that exact pond where, months earlier, I’d so casually caught that big group. If this was a staging area for migrating south, surely they’d make it a stop on their way back north, right? I just had to keep planting on that pond and eventually they’d show. Right?

Maybe. But it wasn’t happening.

Meanwhile: my mom walks her dog along the Humber River quite frequently. And, having heard my sob story multiple times over the winter, she reported what might be a miracle: she’d seen a hooded merganser. Oddly, it appeared that he had been adopted by a pair of mallards. She saw the three of them together as a unit in the river.

This was a single point of evidence. But, in my desperate state, enough for me to plan a trip across town to the Humber.

And then, the evidence mounted. She’d walk the same part of the river and report back: they were there again. This was looking good.

After a week of rain, we had a Friday that looked to be warm and sunny. Exactly the sort of day you’d want to spend outside as much as possible. So I cleared my schedule. I was gonna head for the Humber and make my own way up and down the river (there were a few other targets of opportunity there as well) and make special care to hang out at the part of the river she had seen the ducks.

But you can’t get your hopes up in this business. Nature videography teaches you some hard lessons about staying patient with the chaos of the universe. There are no guarantees. Animals are certainly routine-oriented, but you’re dealing with a system that has so many variables in play that nothing is assured. 

This was foremost in my mind as I walked up and down the stretch of river my mom had pinpointed, and saw… nothing. 

The current was rushing, swollen with recent rain - had that chased them off? I was there in the early afternoon, but she tended to walk her dog later in the day - was it a timing thing? Had they just moved on? Had this just been a stopover of a few days for them? Had a dog or coyote scared them away (or eaten them)?

I planted at that section of river for a long stretch, waiting, watching… nothing. I took a loop of the whole longer section, wondering if maybe they’d just shifted rather than disappearing entirely. Nothing.

Ah well. Can’t get your hopes up in this business. The purpose of this day was not to catch a hooded merganser on film. It was to soak in the sun and the heat after a miserable, wet week. As long as I did that, this was time well spent.

After walking a loop of the river, the plan was to meet my mom at the south parking lot so we could walk the dog together.

When she arrived I explained what I’d done so far. She asked if we could return to the section of river she’d seen them in. I acquiesced but had no expectation. I had waited a long time. The river was uninvitingly churning. The beautiful weather was crowding the riverside with people and dogs.

So we walked back to the same stretch. Yep, I said, this is where I was, this is where I waited. And as you can see, uninhabited.

You’re gonna think I made this part up but I swear this is how it went down.

Just, just as I had dismissed the whole thing and suggested we keep walking, my mom says ‘just hold on one minute’. As soon as the words were out of her mouth we hear the laboured wingbeats of waterfowl overhead. ‘There they are’ she says with perfect casualness, like it was inevitable, as we watch two mallards and a hooded merganser land directly in front of us.

My mom the merganser whisperer.

And the mallards and the merganser were very patient with me as I shot all I could. More than I could have ever hoped. The episode has to do with merganser hunting strategies, and the little guy even went and hauled a huge crayfish out of the water and whipped it around for me (not an ideal angle, but what a moment). 

After about six months of trying, hooded mergansers: in the can.

I need to bring my mom on more shoots.