Wood Duck

The Wood Duck is a small to medium-sized duck of wooded swamps, beaver ponds and slow, tree-lined streams, with a crested, boxy head, a thin neck, broad wings and a long, broad, square-ended tail. It is one of the few ducks with strong claws that grip bark, so you may find one sitting on a branch or a log as well as swimming. Drakes and hens look very different, and the drakes change their look in summer.

The drake in breeding plumage is hard to mistake. His glossy green and purple crested head is cut by two thin white lines, his eye is red, and his bill is patterned red, white and black with a yellow base. A white throat sends two finger-like straps up the cheek and neck. The breast is purplish chestnut with rows of white spots, set off by a white-and-black bar in front of the wing, and the flanks are golden buff below a dark back. Drakes wear these colors from fall to late spring.

The hen is gray-brown, with a gray, slightly crested head and a bold white teardrop around the eye that tapers to the rear. She has a white throat, a grayish bill and a breast speckled and streaked with pale buff, and in flight she shows a blue patch on the wing with a white rear edge. Hens look much the same all year. A drake's eye is red, a hen's dark brown.

From late spring into summer, drakes molt into a dull, hen-like plumage known as eclipse. An eclipse drake is plain gray-brown, but he keeps the red eye and the bright red-and-white bill, and his throat is whiter than a hen's, with the finger-like straps still showing on a gray face. The eye and bill are the quickest way to tell him from a female. In summer each bird drops all its flight feathers at once and cannot fly for about three weeks, and by fall the drakes are back in full color.

Young Wood Ducks, seen mainly from June to August, look like dull hens: a dark crown, a gray face, a pale ring or small patch around the eye with a dark line through it, and a streaked breast and belly. Young drakes soon show the two white straps up the throat and cheek, while young hens have the wider white eye patch. A young drake's eye starts turning red at about 60 days old and his bill is fully colored at about 140-160 days; by late fall young drakes are hard to tell from adults, though their eyes are darker and their bills usually duller.¹

Ducklings are dark brown above and yellowish buff below and on the face, with a dark stripe back from the eye. For how young birds grow up, see juvenile Wood Ducks.

A Wood Duck is 18.5-21.3 in (47-54 cm) long, with a wingspan of 26-28.7 in (66-73 cm), and weighs 16-30.4 oz (454-862 g), about 1-1.9 lb. Males average a little heavier than females, and adults heavier than young birds. It is smaller and lighter than a Mallard, which is 20-26 in (50-65 cm) long and typically weighs 2.2-2.9 lb (1,000-1,300 g). Its slim body lets it slip into large woodpecker holes, and its big eyes help it miss branches as it flies through the canopy.

Overhead, look for a long tail and a dark chest and underwings set against a pale belly; the inner wing has a white rear edge. A Wood Duck holds its head up in flight, sometimes bobbing it. It rises quickly from the water with rapid wingbeats, steers easily through thick woods, and its wings whistle as it passes. A flushed hen usually calls as she goes.

Only one duck has the drake's kind of finery: the Mandarin Duck of eastern Asia, the Wood Duck's only close relative, which sometimes lives wild in North America. A drake Mandarin has a broad white band from the bill to the crest, orange whiskers and upright orange sails on its back. The hens are harder: a female Mandarin has a paler gray head and a narrower white eye-ring that usually runs back as a thin line, not the Wood Duck hen's bold teardrop.

The Hooded Merganser, another duck that nests in tree holes and boxes, has a longer, thinner bill; the drake shows a large white head patch and a white breast, and the female has no white patch around the eye. A female Mallard is bigger, with a rounder head, a dark line through the eye instead of a white eye patch, and an orange bill marked with black. A Green-winged Teal is smaller, with a rounder head and no bold white stripes, and the female lacks the white eye patch. And remember that an eclipse drake looks like a hen until you see his red eye and bright bill.

Wood Ducks call but do not sing. The sound you are most likely to hear is the hen's loud, rising oo-eek, oo-eek, often given as she bursts off the water; she also uses it to find her mate and to keep in touch in flight. The drake's call is a thin, squeaky whistle, jeeb, that rises and then falls, used mainly to keep in contact. In courtship and at evening roosts the hen gives a sharp, falling ter-wee, and when her ducklings are ready to leave the nest she calls them out with a soft, fast kuk, kuk, kuk. At least 12 adult calls and 5 duckling calls have been described, several of which sound alike.¹

Wood Ducks live across much of the US and southern Canada. They breed through eastern North America from southern Canada to Florida, the Gulf Coast and central Texas, and in the West from southern British Columbia to California, mostly west of the Cascades and the Sierra Nevada, with scattered birds in the interior West and a few in Cuba. Most spend the winter in the southern US, on the Atlantic coastal plain from Maryland south and west to eastern Texas. The Mississippi Alluvial Valley is especially important in winter, as is California's Sacramento Valley in the West, and some birds go on into Mexico.

Look for them on wooded swamps, bottomland forests, beaver ponds, slow streams and creeks, and freshwater marshes with trees or thick cover, rather than out on open water. They seem to do best where open water mixes with about half to three-quarters cover of shrubs, fallen trees and water plants.¹ They pick their way along the edges or sit on logs and low branches.

Northern birds do; most southern birds stay all year. Band recoveries suggest about a third of Wood Ducks in the eastern US are residents and almost 75% in the Pacific Flyway do not migrate, while birds from the northeastern US flew an average of 865 miles (1,392 km) to their main wintering areas, against 222 miles (357 km) for birds from the southeastern US.¹ In the North, fall migration runs from mid-September to mid-November, with drakes leaving before hens and young. Migrants set off around sunset and probably fly through much of the night, often in small flocks of 6-12.¹ In spring the first birds reach much of the North in March, later in the far north.

Most pairs form in fall and winter, and the drake follows his hen north to where she will nest. So a drake may migrate a long way one spring and only a short way the next, depending on where that year's mate comes from.

In the evening Wood Ducks gather at roosts in shallow wooded or shrubby wetlands with thick cover, most of all in fall, sometimes a few thousand together. They sleep mostly on the water, but also on logs, banks and muskrat houses, and hens with small young sleep out of the water, preferably on a log.

Wood Ducks eat seeds, nuts, fruit and water plants, and at some times of year plenty of insects and other small animals. Acorns are a favorite. Other foods include the seeds of maples, ash, elm, tupelo, smartweeds, dayflower, grasses, sedges and water-lilies; blackberries, wild cherries and wild grapes; and duckweed and pondweed. In the Mississippi Valley they feed widely on waste wheat, corn and rice in harvested fields, and in orchards they take pecans.

A Wood Duck's gullet stretches to take acorns up to 0.4 in (1.0 cm) wide and 2.2 in (5.7 cm) long, and one held 30 small acorns.¹ In western Mississippi in December and January, the food in 94 birds' gullets was almost all plants: 74.3% acorns and 23.4% soybeans.² There is more on the seasons of its diet in what Wood Ducks eat.

They feed in pairs or small groups, pecking and dabbling at the surface as they move through flooded timber and shallow, plant-filled water, tipping up in the shallows and walking on land; now and then they dive up to about 3 ft (1 m) for acorns. When wetland food runs short they go into upland groves for acorns, orchards for nuts and fields for grain.

Plants make up most of the diet for much of the year, but breeding hens change theirs. Before and during egg-laying they eat many more insects and other invertebrates, which supply the protein and calcium for eggs: in a Missouri study, animal food made up 79% of what laying hens ate, against 34% for breeding drakes, and ducklings live mainly on insects and other invertebrates for their first 2-3 weeks before gradually switching to plants.¹ An egg holds only about 0.2 oz (5 g) of protein, but a hen has to eat large numbers of invertebrates to gather it, and her stored fat is estimated to cover most of the other costs of laying.³

Wood Ducks nest in holes in trees, but cannot dig their own. Most suitable holes form where a branch breaks off and the heartwood rots; old woodpecker holes are used only now and then. Oaks, maples, ashes, aspen, sycamore, beech, elm, bald cypress and tupelo all provide them. The nest tree is usually near or over water, but some are more than a mile away. In a review of 375 nests, cavities averaged 24 ft (7.3 m) above the ground, from 2 to 57 ft (0.6-17.3 m), and the birds seem to favor the higher ones; they also seem to prefer entrances about 3.5-5 in (9-13 cm) across, though they will use much bigger ones.¹

Pairs search in the early morning. The drake waits outside while the hen goes in to inspect each hole, and she alone makes the choice. No nest material is carried in: she lines the hole with down from her breast, starting about halfway through laying. More on nest sites, eggs and timing is in Wood Duck nesting.

The hen lays one egg a day, in the early morning, while the drake waits nearby. First clutches are started in January in the South and in March and April in the North. A hen's own clutch is usually about 10-12 glossy eggs, white or creamy white to tan. Only the hen incubates, for about 30 days on average (25-37 days recorded), starting a few days before the clutch is complete. She leaves the eggs about twice a day to feed, usually in the early morning and late afternoon. Early in the season the pair probably stays together through incubation, but later on the bond may end partway through it or sooner, and the drake plays no part in raising the young.

No other North American duck regularly nests twice in a season, and Wood Ducks do so mostly in the South: in studies, about 10% of hens in South Carolina and in Alabama and Georgia laid a second clutch after their first brood hatched, against under 1% in Massachusetts.¹

Hens often lay eggs in other hens' nests, a habit called egg dumping, so a nest can hold 20 or more eggs. It seems to be normal in natural holes as well as boxes: a genetic study found other hens' eggs in 85% of 39 natural-cavity nests, in nest boxes in Oregon, Missouri and New York 44-58% of nests held them, and in a Minnesota study 39% of Wood Duck nests held the eggs of Hooded Mergansers.¹

Where boxes go matters. In a 12-year study in northeastern Illinois, 49.5% of boxes in plain view held dumped eggs, against 29.8% of boxes put up singly out of sight, and eggs in dumped nests, which held up to 44, hatched less well (57.5%) than eggs in normal nests (67.3%).⁴

The ducklings hatch covered in down and alert, and about a day later, usually in the morning, they leave. The hen flies down to the ground or water below and calls softly. The ducklings climb to the entrance, gripping with their sharp claws and bracing with their tails, and leap out one after another; she does not help them. Jumps from more than 50 feet have been reported without injury,⁵ and a duckling knocked by a twig on the way down soon recovers.

How warm the eggs were kept matters for that first climb. In an experiment, ducklings from eggs incubated at 96.4 and 98.6°F (35.8 and 37.0°C) were about 2.5 times as likely to climb out of a test box on their own as those from eggs kept at 95.0°F (35.0°C), though in a second experiment, with ducklings tested in pairs, there was no such difference.⁶ In a related study, ducklings from the coolest eggs were less likely to leave the nest, and the females among them less likely to survive and go on to breed.⁷

Broods often travel a long way to rearing wetlands: about 1.2 miles (2 km) on average in a South Carolina study, with a longest move of 5.7 miles (9.2 km) on a South Dakota prairie river.¹ The hen alone broods the young, for about two weeks, and stays with them for about four to eight weeks. They can fly at about 8-10 weeks old.

Wood Ducks take readily to nest boxes, which can give safer sites than natural holes. Box programs go back a long way: by 1943 the Illinois Natural History Survey had put up some 800 board boxes along the Illinois and Mississippi rivers,⁸ and on Quiver Creek in central Illinois, predator-proof nest houses raised the breeding population from 10-15 pairs to over 90.⁹ Box nests can do better: at one Illinois site 71% hatched at least one egg against 37% in natural holes, though at another the two did about equally well; whether boxes raise the size of the whole population is not proven, but numbers seemed higher after boxes went up in several studies.¹

Hens often come back. In a South Carolina box study, of the hens found nesting again the next year, 41.9% used the same box and 37.5% another box on the same wetland, and hens that had nested successfully were likelier to return to their old box.¹⁰

A typical box has an oval entrance about 3-3.5 in high and 4-4.5 in wide, a ladder of wire mesh or saw cuts on the inside below the hole for the ducklings, and 4-6 in of wood shavings in the bottom, since the hen brings no nest material. Mount it on a pole with a predator guard below, 4-6 ft above land or water and above high water (one plan says 6 ft on land and 3 ft above the historic high-water mark), with the entrance facing the water and a clear flight path.^{11, 12, 13, 14} Plastic boxes in direct sun can get hot enough to kill the eggs, so they are probably best avoided in the South.¹ Advice on spacing differs: one published plan spaces boxes 50 feet apart, while another guide says to keep them away from other boxes, and the Illinois study found fewer dumped eggs in single, hidden boxes.^{11, 13, 4} In South Carolina, boxes cleaned out at least once during the season held more nests, eggs and ducklings than boxes that were never cleaned.¹⁵

Unlike most ducks, Wood Ducks perch in trees and walk along branches, especially when a hen is hunting for a nest hole. On the ground they walk fast and more upright than dabbling ducks, often feeding near the water's edge, and when they swim the head jerks back and forth like a walking pigeon's. They are wary and are usually seen in small groups, though many more gather at evening roosts. They often feed and rest with Mallards, which can drive them off good feeding spots, and they tolerate people well enough that good numbers nest in towns.

Courtship runs from late summer through spring, much of it in groups, with several drakes displaying to one hen. A drake swims in front of her with wings and tail held high and turns the back of his head to her. In another display, which only Wood and Mandarin Ducks perform, he turns broadside and flicks his closed wings and tail up. He also lifts his chin to show the white throat, and drinks and preens in ritual ways, and pairs preen each other's heads. In southeastern Missouri, courting groups averaged 11.4 birds with about 2.24 drakes for every hen, and 60% of hens were paired by 30 November.¹⁶ Wood Ducks are not territorial: a drake only drives other males away from his mate.

The oldest Wood Duck on the North American banding list was a drake at least 22 years 6 months old: banded as a young bird in Oregon in September 1962, he was shot in California in December 1984. The next oldest, a drake banded in Tennessee in November 1959 and shot in Mississippi in January 1976, reached at least 17 years 7 months.¹⁷

Most live far shorter lives. Band recoveries from 1966 to 1985 gave average yearly survival of about 56% for adult drakes, 51% for adult hens and 43-48% for young birds.¹ Ducklings have the hardest time: radio-tagged ducklings in Mississippi and Alabama survived to 30 days old at rates of 21% and 29%, almost half the deaths were caused by predatory birds, and in older studies most duckling deaths came in the first two weeks.^{18, 1}

Raccoons are the main predator of eggs and sitting hens over most of the range, and rat snakes are the main egg predator in parts of the South; fox squirrels, mink, woodpeckers and starlings also take eggs. Ducklings are eaten by snapping turtles, bullfrogs, big fish such as bass, pike, bowfin and gar, alligators, cottonmouths, mink, Great Blue Herons, Red-shouldered Hawks, and Great Horned and Barred Owls. Adults fall to Great Horned Owls, mink, raccoons, red and gray foxes and alligators. When a hen gives the alarm, her ducklings skitter across the water to cover while she swims off or pretends to have a broken wing, and the young dive if there is nowhere to hide.

The Wood Duck is common and listed as Least Concern worldwide.¹⁹ The North American Waterfowl Management Plan, whose figure Partners in Flight uses, puts the population at about 4.6 million breeding birds, an average for 2002-2011, and Partners in Flight rates it of low concern, 7 out of 20 on its Continental Concern Score.²⁰

On the North American Breeding Bird Survey it rose by 0.88% a year from 1966 to 2025 (95% credible interval 0.54 to 1.21), a clear long-term increase, though all of it came before the early 1990s; since about 1993 the survey's index has been roughly level, and the change from 2015 to 2025 (-0.20% a year, interval -1.29 to 0.94) is not significant.²¹ Florida is the only state with a significant long-term decline (-1.64% a year), while the northern prairies show some of the biggest gains, such as South Dakota's +4.02% a year.²¹ The survey's roadside routes meet Wood Ducks only now and then, which limits what it can show.²² A model that joins a ground survey to it put 0.95 million breeding Wood Ducks in the Atlantic Flyway, from Maine to Florida, in 2025, within the 0.89-1.01 million range seen since 1998.^{23, 24}

Wood Ducks were plentiful until late in the 19th century. Then numbers fell, especially near big cities, through overhunting, logging and the draining of wetlands, and many ornithologists expected the species to die out early in the 20th century; birds hidden in remote swamps kept it going.

The 1916 Migratory Bird Treaty between the US and Great Britain named the wood duck for special protection, by a closed season of at least five years, refuges or other rules.²⁵ The first regulations under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, in 1918, allowed no wood duck season anywhere in the US,²⁶ and it stayed closed until a proclamation of 16 August 1941 reopened seasons in 15 states with a limit of one bird a day, a limit that a 1944 study of Illinois duck regulations reported had stirred much controversy.^{27, 28}

The recovery was remarkable. As numbers grew, Wood Ducks pioneered poorer habitat, north in Ontario and west across the Great Plains, and they seem to have spread north in central British Columbia too; by 1990 band recoveries and harvest data suggested they were back across most of their original range.¹ Protection, nest boxes, the spread of beaver ponds, cautious hunting limits and regrowing forests are all thought to have helped. The forests are still maturing: in northern Minnesota, the estimated number of trees likely to hold suitable nest holes generally rose between the 2005-2009 and 2015-2019 forest surveys.²⁹

In the US the Wood Duck is a protected migratory bird, listed under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which makes it illegal to kill, take or possess one, or its eggs, nest or feathers, except as regulations allow.^{30, 31} As a duck it is also a migratory game bird: it may be hunted only in seasons that states set within federal limits, called frameworks, laid down by the US Fish and Wildlife Service; in the 2025-26 frameworks, three of the four flyways set a separate limit for Wood Ducks.^{32, 33} No federal order allows Wood Ducks to be killed to stop damage, so that would need an individual federal permit.³⁴ In Canada it is protected as a migratory game bird under the Migratory Birds Convention Act, 1994.³⁵