Winter on the Bay: Waterfowl and the Season Nobody Visits

Visitor numbers on this coast fall away after autumn. The birds do the opposite.

Winter on Mobile Bay brings ducks, loons, grebes and gulls that spend their summers thousands of miles north. For anyone willing to stand on a cold shoreline with binoculars, December through February is one of the better times of year here.

What winter brings

Diving ducks on open water — buffleheads, lesser scaup, ring-necked ducks, redheads. Watch for how long they stay under; diving ducks disappear for surprisingly long stretches, and counting a raft means recounting constantly.

Dabbling ducks in the shallows and marsh edges — gadwall, American wigeon, blue-winged and green-winged teal, northern shoveler. These tip forward rather than diving.

Loons and grebes. Common loons winter on the bay in plain grey plumage, nothing like the striking summer birds most people picture. Pied-billed grebes work the quieter edges.

Gulls and terns. Ring-billed and laughing gulls are constant; less common species turn up among them, which is why scanning a gull flock properly is worth the time it takes.

Wintering songbirds. In the woodland: yellow-rumped warblers everywhere, ruby-crowned and golden-crowned kinglets, hermit thrushes, several sparrow species in the field edges. American robins arrive in large flocks and strip berry-producing shrubs.

Why winter birding is easier

No leaves in the way. Deciduous cover is down. Birds that were invisible in June sit in plain view.

No insects. No mosquitoes, no chiggers, no ticks worth worrying about. This alone transforms the experience on this coast.

Birds concentrate. Food is patchier, so birds gather where it is. Finding one active spot can mean finding most of what's around.

Flocks are mixed. Winter feeding flocks pull in several species at once. Locate the chickadees and work through everything travelling with them.

Light is better. Low winter sun for longer, and the harsh overhead glare of a Gulf Coast summer is gone.

What to bring

Layers, because a wind off open water is considerably colder than the air temperature suggests. Waterproof footwear for shoreline mud. Binoculars, and a spotting scope if you have one — waterfowl are usually distant, and this is the season when magnification genuinely matters.

Go in the first hours after sunrise, or the last before sunset. Midday is the slowest part of a winter day.

Reading a raft of ducks

Distant waterfowl are a real identification challenge and worth approaching systematically.

Start with shape and behaviour, not colour. Does it dive or dabble? Where does it sit in the water — high or low? What's the head profile — rounded, peaked, sloping?

Then look at pattern rather than hue. At three hundred yards in flat light, a male bufflehead reads as a small black-and-white duck with a large white patch on the head. That's enough. Fine colour detail rarely survives the distance.

Count in tens. Scan a raft in blocks and add them up rather than trying to count individuals across the whole group.

The quiet part

There is a specific pleasure in this that summer doesn't offer: a cold morning, flat grey water, almost nobody else on the shore, and a few hundred birds going about their business.

The preserve is open and the trails are dry. Very few people use them in January. That is entirely the point.