Wood ducks are the celebrity couple of the waterfowl world—strikingly beautiful and hard to miss. One would think birds with such exotic markings would be confined to the dense forests of the tropics, but this is a strictly North American bird. During the breeding season, both sexes’ plumage is in its full glory.
His emerald crest sweeps back over an iridescent green and purple head. A narrow white stripe arcs through the crest from the base of the bill, joined at the tip by another that drops from behind each luminous red eye. His bill is brightly patterned black, white and red. His chin, throat and belly are white, and his flanks tan. A burgundy chest with white flecks completes his handsome plumage.
The female wood duck is less showy, although she is still more beautiful and colorful than other female ducks. She has a sooty gray-brown head and neck with a smaller, olive-gray crest. A white raindrop-shaped patch surrounds each eye and her bill is dark with thin white line at its base. Her throat is white and her breast is gray-brown stippled with white, fading into the white belly. Her back is olive brown with a shimmer of green.
Wood ducks are one of the few duck species that roost and nest in trees. Their feet are specially adapted for both perching and swimming—webbed feet with claws! They live in wooded areas near water. As one could imagine, Colorado traditionally has not had much in the way of wood duck habitat. The landscape of the shortgrass prairie was too dry and the trees too few and far between. Over time, built reservoirs and agriculture changed the terrain. Wood ducks were first seen nesting in our state during the 1960s. Their numbers have been slowly increasing ever since.
Wood ducks build nests in abandoned woodpecker holes or natural tree cavities caused by disease, fire, or lightning. These ducks will also use constructed nest boxes. They are usually seen using cottonwood trees along riverbanks and lake shorelines in the eastern part of the state, but some have been spotted in the Grand Valley on the Western Slope.
Male wood ducks are extremely territorial during the mating and breeding season, and will protect the area around the female. Wood ducks sometimes nest in trees directly over water, and rarely more than one mile away. Newly hatched wood duck chicks are precocial (relatively mature and mobile) and follow their mothers out of the nest as soon as they’ve hatched. How do they get to the ground from a site several stories high? Well, they jump. And they bounce! They can survive falls of more than 40 feet.