Species Profile: Ring-necked Duck

Ring-necked Duck | Photo by Kyle Smith / Audubon Photography Awards

By Steve Phenicie


“When I start renaming birds, that one is at the top of my list.” I once said that as my colleagues and I gazed at a Ring-necked Duck on a DeKalb County lake during a Christmas Bird Count.


The person who named this bird must have missed an appointment with the optometrist. Oh sure, there’s a brown ring around the neck of the male, but it’s very hard to see. Meanwhile, the white rings on the bill are obvious. The male is a gleaming black, gray, and white. The female, which is brown, has a white ring toward the end of her bill, and the area around the base is a lighter color than her head. At a distance, look for the distinctive peaked head to help you identify this bird.


This duck nests mostly in the northern United States and Canada and winters in the southern U.S., Mexico, and the Caribbean. In summer it can be found on freshwater marshes, ponds, and bogs, mainly in openings in forested country; in the winter it also likes rivers and bays. These ducks put their nests among dense sedges and other emergent plants, typically building them directly over the water or on floating vegetation; this helps protect them from land-based predators.


They don’t do much nest building, however, until the female begins to lay eggs; at this time the nest is typically just a flimsy collection of bent-over plant stems. The female then makes a simple bowl out of sedges and other plants that she gathers from nearby. She lines the nest with her own down feathers. The finished nest is up to 11 inches across, with a cup two to four inches deep. There the female lays eight to 14 eggs, and there’s usually a ramp built to help her get in and out of it while incubating.


Ring-necked Ducks feed by diving underwater, rather than by tipping up as “dabbling” ducks do, going after submerged plants and aquatic invertebrates. Plants they like include pondweed, water lilies, wild celery, wild rice, millet, sedges, and arrowhead. They also eat mollusks (swallowing them whole and crushing the shells in their gizzard) as well as snails, caddisflies, dragonfly nymphs, midges, earthworms, and leeches. 


Some cool facts about Ring-necked Ducks:

• During fall migration, they can form immense flocks. Several hundred thousand congregate each fall on certain lakes in Minnesota to feed on wild rice.
  
• While on their breeding grounds occasionally they get attacked by the much larger Common Loon, the Red-necked Grebe, and even the much smaller Pied-billed Grebe.
  
• The oldest known Ring-necked Duck was at least 20 years, 5 months old. He was banded in Louisiana in 1964 and shot in Minnesota in 1983.
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Among the many places in Georgia where they were reported last winter were Bear Creek Reservoir in Jackson County, Lake Windward in Alpharetta, Piedmont Park in Atlanta, Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge, Savannah National Wildlife Refuge, Phinizy Swamp in Augusta, and Haig Mill Lake Park in Dalton.