I saw my first harlequin ducks on a backpacking trip in Olympic National Park in Washington. We were an afternoon’s walk from the trail head, settled into a campsite in a shady grove along the Elwha River. I was reclining on the bank, staring seriously at the river, when I noticed a small dark duck standing in the shallows about 50 yards downstream on the opposite bank. The patches of white on the sides of her head identified her as a female harlequin. Then I saw, just behind her, a bobbing raft of six young, perhaps three-quarters grown.
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If they saw something that might be good to eat, they pecked at it, or if it was down a little deeper, tipped up like mallards with their rumps sticking out of the water and their necks stretching down toward the food. From time to time, they dove, staying under for as much as 30 seconds.
Their movements had the same grace as the motion of the water and their dark bodies blended so well with the deep gray rocks that it was often hard to find them, even though I knew approximately where they were. They worked the whole river, bank to bank, fast water and slow.
Harlequins nest in alpine and subarctic streams in both North America and Asia. In the Soviet Union, their range extends from Lake Baikal east to the limits of Asia and then beyond. They nest in the Aleutians and the Pribilofs and in the mountains from Alaska south to Oregon and Wyoming. The eastern population lives on Greenland and the islands of the Canadian arctic and south along the Atlantic coast to Labrador.
If you want to see harlequin ducks in the winter, your best bet is along the northern parts of either coast, but in late fall and early spring, we do sometimes see these birds on Lake Michigan. Our shores don’t naturally provide the sort of rough and rocky circumstances that harlequins prefer, so they tend to concentrate around harbors and breakwaters where concrete can provide a reasonable facsimile of rocks. We look for them at Michigan City and Waukegan or along the breakwaters in Evanston.
