The other day I saw three cinnamon teal, my first sighting on the Great Plains. People who know me well know how happy that made me.
My first Montana home was in the Bitterroot, and there I learned from a writer friend that true Bitterrooters, at least those of the birding persuasion, liked to say it wasn’t truly spring until you saw your first cinnamon teal. I’ve repeated that line a time or two in this column over the years, sorry, but that saying stuck with me because when I first heard it, after moving from California, it made me feel at home.
You see, Cinnamon teal have followed me wherever I’ve moved.
I’ve been aware of cinnamon teal for almost as long as I’ve been seriously aware of ducks in general. Serious awareness comes from hunting, of course. One of the things that sets waterfowl hunting apart from most other forms of hunting is the variety of species you’re likely to encounter in the marshlands.
Before I hunted ducks I knew of two kinds: mallards and those domesticated white pekins that are often released as living ornamentation in the ponds of urban parks. The mallard is the source species for most domesticated ducks and wild mallards readily mate with white pekins, resulting in some oddball hybrids.
Once you start hunting waterfowl you need to expand your repertoire of identifiable ducks. First, assuming you like your duck to taste like duck and not sardines, you need to know what mergansers in flight look like so you don’t shoot one. Fortunately, it’s not too tough. Mergansers have a long bill designed for fish capture and a narrow rather than bulbous head that rides a little lower than the noggin of your average dabbler.
Next is shoveler identification. These ducks are close to the size of mallards and the males have a similar green head, but the shoveler’s bill hints of a bird needing orthodontic care. You can pick that overbite out in flight. Shovelers are not as far down the culinary rankings as mergansers, but some hunters still avoid them.
Cinnamons are closely related to shovelers and often associate with them. Cinnamons also have a larger than average bill, though not quite so pronounced as a shoveler’s. That bill comes in handy when you’re trying to identify nondescript female cinnamon teal, but there’s no mistaking males.
Males are an iridescent brick red on their necks and breast, with the usual mash-mash of plumage on the wings and back and the wings also sport a patch of sky-blue feathers, the speculum, that is visible in flight. That big bill is black as pitch, next to the bird’s fire-red eyes.
I said these birds followed me as I moved about, but it’s really the other way around. I saw my first cinnamon teal on a spring fishing trip in the eastern Sierra. I never found them there during hunting season, however, as they’d already migrated south. My Spanish professor at Riverside Community College, Tony Hernandez, often punctuated his lectures with tales of hunting cinnamons, in Mexico.
Then there were those spring equinox heralding Bitterroot teal. “Cinema teal,” my toddler daughters called them. Later, in Arizona, I learned cinnamon teal were an indicator species on Anderson Mesa and the subject of my master’s thesis was the mesa’s struggling pronghorn herd. There is a relationship between goats and ducks, on Anderson Mesa at least.
Now, in my seventh year on the Great Plains, near the far eastern limit of their range, I’ve discovered cinnamon here as well.
Cinnamon teal are ducks of the Southwest, and warmer climes; their spring migration just reaches Montana. That’s why my old prof had to go to Mexico to hunt them. They arrive late in the season, then get out of Dodge before the weather hits.
Cinnamon teal were snowbirds before Quartzsite made snowbirds cool.