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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.