I’m lucky to live a few minutes from the biggest pond on the Cape – Long Pond, whose more than 700 acres touch both Brewster and Harwich. With the cold, old-school early winter we’ve had, the pond has been mostly iced over, but with enough open water to support hundreds of ducks. Under these conditions, Long Pond is a perfect place to experience one of the joys of winter birding – the tense, often deadly pairing of ducks and eagles.
I stopped by Long Pond one morning last week. I haven’t been seeing that many eagles anywhere this winter and was starting to wonder where they all were. Some winters I’ve seen seven eagles there, with five of them standing around on the ice at the same time. Yet here was a picture-perfect eagle buffet – you had the ice, a little open water, and tons of food in the form of 10 species of ducks crammed into that small patch of water – but no eagles.
At least I had the ducks to keep me busy. I eventually counted at least 650 Greater Scaup along with a few Lesser Scaup, plus some Ring-necked Ducks, Buffleheads, Common and Red-breasted Mergansers, and a bunch of Common Goldeneye – all diving ducks. The mergansers eat fish, but the scaup were here for the freshwater mussels. All winter there you can watch them dive down then bring them back to the surface before choking them down whole. A smaller open water patch at the west end of the pond held just two birds, a Common Loon and a White-winged Scoter, both more typically found on salt water this time of year.
Finally a pair of adult eagles showed up in the way that a couple that just had a fight in the car shows up to a party – they flew in a minute apart and went to different parts of the pond. The first one landed in a typical perch for winter eagles there, one with a commanding view of the whole pond and all its delicious ducks. The second landed on the ice maybe 200 yards from the duck-packed open water patch. I figured something was about to go down.
After several minutes, the eagle on the ice finally got up and flew toward all the ducks. It turned out this was just a fake out, as it then veered west, then casually flew up behind the clueless White-winged Scoter and grabbed it. This was a strategic move – a scoter is a bigger meal than any of those smaller ducks, plus this isolated bird was a, well, a sitting duck. And a naïve one at that - scoters are sea ducks so don’t usually have to deal with aerial predators out there on the ocean.
The eagle took its meal to another part of the ice and started to eat. Soon the other eagle appeared quite close to me along with an immature bird I hadn’t seen yet. The adult seemed annoyed by the young bird and several times locked talons with it. The youngster, which may have been two years old, later landed near the “duck crudo” hoping to get in on the meal. Eventually the adults drove it off, escorting it about a mile to the northwest. It’s likely one of their own kids that moved back in after college, and they clearly weren’t having it that day.
As if the Wild America-style show I was treated to wasn’t enough, I ended up finding an ultra-rare hybrid duck hiding amongst the hundreds of scaup like a watery “Where’s Waldo?” It was an apparent cross between a Tufted Duck and a Greater Scaup, the former being itself a rare vagrant from Eurasia. It had a stub of a tuft and plumage halfway between the two parent species. This bird has likely wintered on the Brewster-Harwich ponds for several years as a similar bird has been seen occasionally around here since at least 2020.
So I recommend you find a good duck pond near you, preferably one with some ice, and see what the eagle situation is. Even the islands have eagles these days – someone watched a pair of adults standing on the ice eating a duck in West Tisbury last week. And if you arrive on the scene soon enough, maybe you can help out the hapless waterfowl before the eagle grabs it by yelling “duck!” Though I suppose that may not work under the circumstances.
