Great Migrations

This past winter, standing on the cold shores of coastal North Carolina, I witnessed a marvel that few people in the 21st century have experienced. Stretching to the horizon were tens of thousands of redhead ducks (Aythya americana), gathered into immense living rafts, their collective bodies weaving and swaying with the tides like a living, breathing, tapestry.

Their numbers were staggering — a symphony of crimson crowns, slate backs, and black-tipped bills weaving together atop the quiet backwaters of an estuary. Each bird, a single stitch in a greater design. It was a reminder that migrations are not only measured in distance, but in scale, in heartbeat, in instinct that runs deeper than memory.

And now, as April deepens into May, I find myself preparing to follow these birds home.

The redheads are moving, called northward by ancient triggers: lengthening days, the subtle warming of the marshes, the pull of wetlands their ancestors have known for millennia. As they ascend the flyways, their great gatherings begin to loosen, scattering into smaller, intimate groups bound for the glacially carved heart of North America: the Prairie Pothole Region.

It is here, across the sprawling grasslands of North Dakota, South Dakota, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan, that the next chapter of their lives will unfold. And it is here, amid these wind-tossed prairies and sky-mirrored ponds, that I will spend the coming month chest deep in cold waters hoping to photograph these birds in the place where their lives begin.

The Prairie Pothole Region, what is essentially North America’s Duck Factory, is one of the most vital and imperiled breeding grounds for waterfowl in the Western Hemisphere. Formed by the retreat of the Laurentide Ice Sheet some 10,000 years ago, this landscape is pocked with millions of shallow, ephemeral wetlands: the potholes.

For redhead ducks, these basins are not merely water and mud — they are life itself.

Unlike dabbling ducks that nest in upland grasses, redheads are true creatures of the marsh. They prefer wetlands dense with cattails, bulrush, and sedge — tangled aquatic fortresses where they can anchor their floating nests. In years of drought, when these wetlands dry or shrink, redhead nesting success plummets. In wet years, when the potholes brim with snowmelt and spring rain, their populations rebound. Wax and wane, ebb and flow, with some 90% of their global population dependent upon thirst string of oasis in the Great American Desert, the life and times of red head ducks is always teetering upon a knife’s edge, but especially now in a place where wetlands are considered wastelands in a landscape of wheat and corn.

Fascinatingly, redheads engage in a reproductive strategy known as brood parasitism. Roughly 40% of females lay eggs in the nests of other ducks — particularly canvasbacks — relying on them to incubate their offspring. Some redhead hens parasitize dozens of nests in a single season. Others still build nests of their own, weaving careful rafts of aquatic vegetation, anchored to submerged stems, bobbing gently amid the reeds.

This dual strategy — part opportunist, part architect — speaks to the evolutionary ingenuity required to thrive in the shifting, uncertain world of the prairie potholes. It is a landscape shaped by drought, flood, wildfire, and ice even before we throw the machine of western civilization into the mix. Flexibility is survival.

Since European settlement, more than half of the region’s wetlands have been drained, tilled under for agriculture, or lost to development. Even now, as redhead flocks billow over the Great Plains, the habitats they depend on are fragmenting under the dual pressures of land conversion and climate change. Despite these challenges, redhead populations have held relatively steady compared to many other waterfowl species. This resilience is in large part thanks the behavioral plasticity of the species and to conservation efforts like the North American Waterfowl Management Plan and work of organizations such as Ducks Unlimited, which have preserved and restored key wetlands across the region.

Still, every spring migration is a race against time. Every nest built, every clutch laid, every brood hatched is a wager.

There’s a deep satisfaction in being able to connect the moments I captured this winter — the great masses of redheads upon a salt laden estuary with the roar of the ocean in the background, the early morning explosions of wings, the endless shimmer of red and gray against the dawn sky — with the quieter, more intimate world I will find on the prairie.

In the potholes, there are no rafts of fifty thousand. Instead, there are pairs. Courtship displays ripple across the wetlands, each male bowing and dipping before a potential mate, crooning low, guttural calls. Nests float hidden in the cattails. Down-shrouded ducklings will soon spill into the shallows, each a tiny life riding the tides of ancient ritual.

To photograph redheads in winter is to bear witness to their collective power.

To photograph them on their breeding grounds is to glimpse their vulnerability, and their hope.

Cheers,

Jared

P.S. In the upcoming Summer issue of PhotoWILD Magazine, I will have a feature article all about the Prairie Potholes Region and using Floating Blinds.