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Birding can be tough. Well, not tough, exactly. But difficult to figure out. A lot of those little suckers, like warblers and wrens, are small, or brown, or fast. But even the bigger ones, like hawks, can be hard to identify. Sitting on telephone poles or soaring above a park or open space, the colors and shapes of their feathers, bills or talons can be hard to sort out.
Related: Experts share their favorite winter birding destinations in Colorado
Which is why ducks are one of my favorite birds to watch, especially in the winter when there is a wider variety of them on metro Denver’s reservoirs, lakes and waterways. While some of Denver’s summer birds fly further south to warmer climates in the winter, many of the ducks consider Colorado to be a beachy paradise when compared to their habitats further north.
So they settle in for the winter along the Front Range.
Hooded Merganser on the Platte River near Bluff Lake Nature Center in Denver, December 2020. Audrey Hannifin, Special to The Denver PostThey are also beautiful. Take the bufflehead, one of my favorites. These little diving ducks breed in Canada and Alaska before migrating for the winter. The males have greenish faces, purple necks and white underparts. But their most striking feature is the patch of white on the back part of their heads that makes them look like enchanting pie charts.
Then there’s the hooded merganser, which, despite its fairy-tale appearance, is one of the more common ducks along the Front Range in winter. They also have pie chart heads, but in this case, their underides are rust colored, while their breasts have black and white stripes. Their crowning feature, though, is literally their crowns, wind-ruffled crests that make them hard to miss, even from a distance.
Duck spotting in the winter comes with its own challenges, of course. The ducks that are so abundant on a pond one day might be gone the next. Some bodies of water are so big that you may only be able to see ducks with a spotting scope (or find a friendly fellow birdwatcher who will let you look through theirs). And then there’s the sun. If you’re facing east at any point in the morning, you won’t be able to tell a goldeneye from a gadwall because of the glare. (Ask me how I know.)
And it’s not like birds carry signs around their necks to advertise their breeds — although I wish they did — so they can sometimes be difficult to tell apart, no matter how unusual their markings. Green-winged teals, for instance, and American wigeons both have green plumage running from their eyes back along their heads and down their necks like giant paint strokes.
One of the most truly amazing ducks, though, is the wood duck. It doesn’t even look real. Bluish-green, orange and tan with white stripes, the male version of these ducks looks almost like a court jester wearing a Roman legion helmet. I saw a pair recently at Cottonwood Lake in Lakewood, and it made my day. Any day I see a wood duck is a good day.
A bufflehead duck in flight. (Getty Images)Altogether in 2026 so far, I have seen roughly a dozen different species of ducks, but there are plenty I have missed, including redheads, Barrow’s goldeneyes, cinnamon teals, long-tailed ducks, ruddy ducks and scaups.
To find them, I’ll be heading to some of my favorite spots, most of which are smaller bodies of water, including Duck Lake in City Park, Prospect Park in Wheat Ridge, Cottonwood Park in Lakewood, Lake Ladora inside the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge and Bluff Lake in Denver’s Central Park neighborhood.
I’ll probably also find myself at the larger habitat areas, like Cherry Creek and Chatfield Reservoirs, Standley Lake in Arvada and Lagerman Reservoir in Boulder County. But I’ll also be watching for those friendly fellow birders with their scopes.
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