Northern Pintail

About the Northern Pintail

The Northern Pintail is the most elegant duck in North America - a slender, long-necked dabbler with the drake in chocolate-brown head, a white breast whose stripe runs up the side of the neck, gray flanks, and the long, needle-thin central tail feathers that name the bird. The hen is a warm, plain buff-brown with the same graceful long-necked shape.

Pintails feed by tipping up in shallow water and by walking flooded fields for waste grain, and they are fast, agile fliers that come into a marsh in long, wavering lines. They are among the earliest ducks to move south in fall and among the first to head north again in late winter.

In Texas the Northern Pintail is an abundant winter visitor from October through March, with enormous flocks on the coastal marshes and rice country and smaller numbers on inland reservoirs, ponds, and city lakes across the state.