Waiting for the shovelers to arrive

 We have a couple of cold fronts headed this way, and I’m looking forward to seeing some of the birds that winter on the creek.

Last winter, we had a bunch of shovelers. The male shoveler is a beautiful little duck with a green head and a two-tone body that reminds me of the brown and white wingtip shoes that were in fashion when I was a boy. Female shovelers look like the generic female duck — much like the mottled duck of both sexes. The shovelers are distinguished by their oversized bills, almost always black, but I’ve seen a yellowish-brown bill.

There were also some mallards and coots mixed in with the shovelers. The coots are strange birds. They appear too short by a quarter; that is, they look like a battleship built on a destroyer’s hull. And they swim like a windup toy — head bobbing back and forth as their legs pump.

The domestic ducks and geese that live on the creek year-round sometimes join this flotilla.

The shovelers sometimes will start to circle — you’ll see a pair, herding minnows into a tight circle. Others will join. One morning last January, a circle of 23 shovelers surrounded a school of baitfish. It looked like an old Western movie — warriors on horseback attacking circled wagons.

Some people say that shovelers swim and skim, rather than dive, and hardly ever go bottoms up. But I sometimes see 20 upended shoveler rumps on a day’s walk. One of the wonders of the creek.