Jemima Puddle-duck he’s not. Nor does he bear much similarity to any of the other fictional anatids that feather the pop culture pantheon. Neither Daffy nor Donald, nor, for that matter, that pushy AFLAC insurance spokesbird, has either the sartorial panache or the wickedly serrated beak of the merganser.

Male red-breasted merganser (Mergus serrator), Lake Michigan, Chicago. Credit: Richard Pallardy

Ducks tend to be represented as benign figures of fun—and not without reason. Dabbling ducks like mallards, those familiar habitues of park lagoons and farm ponds—from which the familiar white domestic ducks are descended—are less than graceful on land and only slightly more so on the water or in the air. To the casual observer, their main preoccupations appear to be plucking at water weeds, or squabbling awkwardly over stale baked goods from misguided wildlife enthusiasts, or perhaps blocking traffic as they harriedly shepherd their flocks of fuzzy progeny to and fro. As a friend pointed out recently while we watched mallards foraging for algae in a local pond, there is something inherently amusing about their plumed rumps shamelessly protruding from the muddy water.

The merganser branch of the duck family, however, has shed the, well, daffiness, that defines their mostly vegetarian cousins, who, generally speaking, prefer the calmer waters of inland ponds and rivers. The forms and habits of the 5-6 species of mergansers are tailored to life on the large lakes and coastal regions where they are found and to their diet of fish and crustaceans. Though perhaps even more clumsy on land than dabbling ducks, their aquatic skills are impressive—they propel their streamlined bodies to depths of up to 30 ft—and their beaks, far from the blunted salad tongs of their cousins, are blade-like scissors arrayed with sharp, backward-facing points for gripping their slick quarry. Red-breasted mergansers, which feed on small fish like smelt, blenny, hake, minnows, herring, and, to the chagrin of fish farmers, young trout and salmon, evidently have poor impulse control: they may eat so much that they have to vomit in order to fly. One dissected specimen revealed exactly how adventurous (or undiscriminating) its palate was: inside its stomach was a shark.

Now, lest the reader envision this still very duck-sized bird unhinging its jaws and gagging down a stunted great white or inhaling a runty hammerhead, it should be noted that the creature in question was described as a “spotted shark”, probably a species of dogfish, and wasn’t much more than 4 inches long. Nonetheless, there’s some satisfaction in imagining a bird typically conceived as defenseless and faintly idiotic turning the tables on a member of the most feared group of predators in the sea (however miniscule). As perhaps befitting such a warrior-like bird, female red-breasted mergansers frequently abandon their ducklings before they are fledged. They are also known to lay their eggs in other females’ nests. However, some new mothers group together and communally care for their young (a phenomenon known as crèching).

The Chicago lakeshore is visited by three species of merganser, including the common merganser (Mergus merganser) and the red-breasted merganser (Mergus serrator)—depicted above—as well as the more distantly-related hooded merganser (Lophodytes cucullatus). I spotted the latter two species on a recent April stroll along the lake, noting, as William Macgillivray griped in his 19th century A History of British Birds, Indigenous and Migratory, that the red-breasted merganser was “not very fitly named.” There’s not much, if any, red on his breast at all.

Still, watching them smoothly slip below the choppy waters and resurface yards away with their prey (or without it), and observing small flocks of them coursing low along the shoreline in search of less crowded environs put any nomenclatural nit-picking out of mind and instead turned my thoughts to the inexorable forces of natural selection. That the plebeian quackers I’d seen on an inland pond the week before shared a common ancestor with the sleek, silent predators patrolling the smoky blue depths of the lake testified to the plasticity of life. And as a male surfaced, shaking droplets from his iridescent coiffure, eyed me suspiciously, and paddled away, I wondered if these shy, very wild birds would be as equal to the challenge of coexistence with humans as their bovine mallard cousins.