Three Beautiful Drakes

     Beautiful is not enough to describe these ocean ducks.  Drakes of three species of sea ducks are about the most striking of ducks in northern North America.  The colors and color patterns of those elegant drakes are fantastic, unbelievable.  Those colors serve to intimidate rival males of each kind during spring breeding seasons and attract females to the males for mating and reproduction.  Females of each kind, however, are plainer for camouflage while setting on eggs and raising ducklings through summer.     
     These attractive drakes are of long-tailed duck, harlequin duck and king eider duck species, which all winter in flocks on northern oceans, including the North Atlantic.  Use a field guide to birds of eastern North America to see their colors and patterns, and learn more details of their life styles.
     Long-tailed ducks nest on the Arctic tundra along the coast of the Arctic Ocean, including on Greenland and Iceland.  In winter, large flocks of them congregate mostly where ocean breakers roll to shore.  There they dive to the bottom to eat mollusks, crustaceans and small fish.  Drakes of this species are mostly white in winter, with dark chests, wings and cheeks which create lovely patterns, topped off with the two long, black tail feathers that give this species its name.  
     Harlequin ducks are a small species that nest along swift rivers and creeks in the northwestern United States, western Canada and most of Alaska.  They winter in little groups along rocky coasts of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, including rock jetties built to preserve the beaches of the North Atlantic.  They dive for mollusks and crustaceans in the choppy waters near those rocky shorelines.  Drake harlequins are handsome with red flanks and gray bodies with several white and black stripes and marks.
    But drake king eiders are the real dandies of these elegant sea ducks.  These large, stocky ocean birds have black bodies and wings, trimmed with a few white stripes and patches and buffy chests.  But their head feathers are magnificent.  They are pale-blue on top of the head and down the back of the neck.  Their cheeks are pale-green and they have light-orange knobs above red beaks.      
    King eiders nest on the Arctic tundra along the coast of the Arctic Ocean, including on Baffin Island of Canada and northern Greenland.  These majestic ducks form large rafts of themselves on the Atlantic Ocean through winter where they dive for crustaceans, mollusks and ocean worms on the bottom of the ocean.  Although sea ducks consume much the same kinds of foods, they do so in different niches which reduces competition among them for that food. 
     We can see these handsome ducks along the Atlantic Coast, if we look in the right places at the right times long enough.  But if we don't spot them, it's still neat to know they are there.