We were birding several spots around Big Island Wildlife Area, hoping for some lingering ducks in late April, but it seemed like everywhere we looked, we had squeaking, fluttering groups of Blue-winged Teal. I hadn’t seen so many of them in Ohio, but grew up with them in Florida. There, they are more common than Mallards, and every little wetland, pond, and ditch has a few in winter. But here they were calling and displaying, with the males in their outrageous spring plumage. We kind of lost track of the other waterfowl, just smiling and nodding at the bleating swarms of little ducks that had taken over the wetlands.
We don’t think too much about Teal here in Ohio (unless you’re a waterfowl hunter), but Blue-winged Teal are the second most common duck in North America after Mallards. Let that sink in for a moment. There are nearly 8 million of the little squeakers in North America, and hunters bag nearly a million each season. How do they get so common? Well, for starters, they’re not too picky about habitat. Any small shallow water will do, whether it be a prairie pothole, a mangrove marsh, or a Walmart retention pond. They tend to like water shallow enough to walk around in, using their beak to still up the sediment for seeds and bugs. They might be the waterfowl most like a shorebird. Here’s a neat video of them from Kansas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEKD2i38PPQ
Their shorebird-like propensity for shallow water has shaped a lot of their biology. They produce only 1 brood of young a year, but their clutch size can range from 6 up to 14. Their incubation time is quite short – 19-24 days – probably since their shallow water marshes dry out quickly and are crawling with predators. Mate loss is common, what with predators and hunters, so Blue-wings don’t form lasting pair bonds. In fact, they usually re-pair every spring with a new mate. The fact that they don’t pair until on migration or on their breeding grounds is quite different from other waterfowl that pair in late winter, but similar to distance-migrating shorebirds.
Shallow water also can be subject to quick freezes, both in fall and spring, so Blue-winged Teal are very early to migrate in fall, and late to arrive in spring. ‘Teal Season’ for hunters is usually in September, long before most other waterfowl are migrating (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyVCBh6Mc4c ). In spring, they don’t make much of an appearance before early April, again well after most other waterfowl have moved north. Most other waterfowl have shown a progressively later fall and earlier spring migration for several decades now (e.g. https://academic.oup.com/condor/article/125/4/duad041/7258631 ), so that diving ducks and cold-hardy dabblers like Pintail and Gadwalls now do much of their migration in mid-February to mid-March. Blue-winged Teal stubbornly refuse to do this, still clinging to their typical late arrival dates. How this might be affected by climate change is anybody’s guess.
Locally, you can find them at most of our larger shallow wetlands like Battelle-Darby, Pickerington Ponds, and Big Island. Here in Ohio, we’re at the southeastern edge of their breeding range, which extends from Alaska to Nova Scotia (https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Blue-winged_Teal/maps-range ). They’re thick in the Prairie Potholes of the northern Great Plains, but they’re adaptable in their breeding, and can breed as far north as the muskeg ponds of northern Canada and Alaska. Their long migration also makes them likely to stray and colonize new areas, and there are outlier colonies of breeding Blue-wings in the Ozarks, Pennyrile Plains of Kentucky, Newfoundland, and even the tundra around Churchill, Manitoba. From tundra to muskeg ponds to prairie potholes and man-made marshes, if it’s shallow, seedy, and buggy, chances are that Blue-wings are already breeding there.