Yet spring is on the wing, fluttering, skittering and splashing onto the ponds of the Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge.
The dabbling ducks are everywhere:
The cinnamon teal just arrived Tuesday, beautiful animals known for their ruby red eyes and intense cinnamon-colored headwear.
Redheads are diving for their lunch - bottoms up! - on one of the refuge’s dozen-plus ponds, as a dozen green-winged teals buzz past overhead.
And oh, the mergansers - christened “common,” but mistakenly so. They’re big - the jumbo jets of the duck world - and showy. Males and females of this species do their own thing: the females sporting wild, rusty crested heads and dabbled gray bodies; the males opting for glossy green heads and white bodies, a single black stripe down the middle.
But what makes the spring migration such a spectacle - and that it is - at the Metcalf refuge is the abundance of waterfowl species and the ease of their watching.
“Your timing is perfect,” said Bob Danley, the refuge’s outdoor recreation planner. “We’re only missing the ruddy ducks and blue-winged teals, and they should be coming in any day now.”
This is rookie wildlife-watcher heaven, smack in the middle of the Bitterroot Valley.
“Right now,” Danley said, “the great thing about ducks is they are big, really colorful and for the most part they swim kind of slow so it’s not, 'Whoops, they’re gone.’
“You can just park on Wildfowl Lane, use your car as a blind, roll down the windows and with a very basic pair of binoculars see and hear the spectacle of migration - right here, in reality.
“All the ducks are really at their peak colors. They’ve formed their pairs, so you’ll see a lot of head throwing and a variety of noises. If you want to do the car thing, this is the perfect opportunity.”
Danley’s office is itself something of a blind, from which he’s spotted thousands of birds so far this spring: northern shoveler, mallard, gadwall, bufflehead, hooded merganser, common merganser, American widgeon, northern pintail, green-winged teal, lesser scaup, Barrow’s goldeneye, common goldeneye, cinnamon teal, redheads and canvasbacks, wood ducks, Canada geese and snow geese.
The sandhill cranes have arrived with their deep, rattling calls and lifelong mates. “Gu-rrroo, gu-rrroo, gu-rrroo.”
And he’s heard the swans - trumpeter and tundra - as they glide across the Metcalf’s open water.
The trumpeters are the ones with the low-pitched call - “koh-koh” - the sound of air forced through a long, long windpipe. Tundra swans are smaller, with higher-pitched voices.
And don’t forget to watch for the raptors, Danley said: hawks riding the thermals at mid-day, an eagle already incubating eggs on a nest, osprey calling from the river’s edge.
“At Lee Metcalf, our wetlands are spring fed, so we have a number of species that overwinter on little holes in the ice,” he said. “But they’re really building up and staging right now, and the viewing is most excellent.
“Lee Metcalf is right up there as far as a place to see waterfowl.”
The 2,800-acre refuge’s founding document, in fact, speaks to the sustenance its habitats provide migratory birds. It is, by nature’s design, an oasis of ponds and lush riparian areas hugging the Bitterroot River.
To see for yourself, take Wildfowl Lane off the Eastside Highway, about 25 miles south of Missoula and two miles north of Stevensville.
The refuge is open during daylight hours; its headquarters/visitor center keep the doors unlocked from 8-4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. Questions? Call 777-5552.
Danley suggests simply pulling over alongside Wildfowl Lane and watching from the car. “No one will mind, not even the birds.”
Western Montana’s potholes, ponds and marshes are essential stopovers for migrating waterfowl this time of year - one of the few intact refuges between winter’s sojourn to the south and summer’s nesting grounds up north.
“Waterfowl don’t have that many destination points between their wintering and nesting areas,” said Mark Schlepp, manager of Freezeout Lake Wildlife Management Area for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.
In western Montana, there’s Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in the southwestern corner, the Lee Metcalf refuge in the Bitterroot, Ninepipe National Wildlife Refuge in the Mission Valley and - across the mountains on the Rocky Mountain Front - Freezeout Lake.
Statistically speaking, Freezeout is the five-star attraction, with up to 300,000 snow geese and 10,000 tundra swans stopping for a few days of R&R each spring.
This year’s migration has been slow going, Schlepp said Wednesday, with the best viewing likely over the next few weeks.
Snow geese have been arriving for the past two weeks, feeding in the barley stubble on the Fairfield Bench, then queuing up in long lines across the lake to roost.
The geese love Freezeout for its wide expanse of open water, but they love the waste barley most of all, said Mike Schwitters, a retiree who for nearly 20 years has kept watch over the twice-yearly migratory hordes.
Each noon, he waits for new arrivals. The geese fly 18 hours non-stop from southern Oregon, leaving at sunset one day and arriving at Freezeout the next noon.
After their long flights north, the birds need the carbohydrates to build up fat - and they can, Schwitters said, tell the high-carb barley stubble from the wheat.
He counted nearly 80,000 snow geese at Freezeout last weekend, and about 40,000 on Wednesday - a normal weekly progression as flocks move in and out. They’re easy to spot overhead because of the huge numbers moving between ponds and fields.
“The white geese want to be with other white geese,” Schwitters said. “They stay together.”
But after four or five days at the buffet, the geese move on. Freezeout’s migrants include three different populations of snow geese: one goes all the way to Wrangle Island, Russia; another winds up in the northern Canadian Arctic; the third spends summers in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.
“We can see these geese in one big push or over a longer, extended migration period,” Schlepp said. “This year is one of those longer migrations. We’ll probably see geese for a couple more weeks.”
More solitary and fewer in number - albeit still impressive - are the 10,000 or so tundra swans that use Freezeout as a refueling stop. Schlepp hasn’t seen many swans yet; he suspects the weather has been too cold.
“We had ice on most of the area until recently, and it’s slowly breaking up,” he said. “They could still be coming.”
Ducks are even later arrivals at Freezeout, waiting for the warmer winds that eventually tumble off the Front. As many as 15,000 pintails will congregate on the shortgrass prairie marsh between Fairfield and Choteau. The lake itself covers much of 12,000 square acres, with the rest relegated to shallow ponds, bunchgrass, cattails and bullrushes.
This year, one pond has been taken over by two-dozen bald eagles, scavenging birds lost over the winter or during hunting season, or injured on the trip north this spring.
Last of all come the shorebirds: American avocets, black-necked stilts, killdeer, snipes and phalaropes, marbled godwits and whimbrels. It is May by the time they’ve come and gone.
Find Freezeout Lake by taking U.S. Highway 89 between Fairfield and Choteau. There are roads throughout the wildlife management area’s interior, and many turnouts and parking areas just off the highway.
There’s a recorded waterfowl update to help visitors time their trip. Call (406) 467-2646.
More than 20,000 birdwatchers visit Freezeout during the peak migrations, but it’s a big area with plenty of room. And never, Schwitters said, is there a day when people outnumber birds on the Rocky Mountain Front.
Reach editor Sherry Devlin at (406) 523-5250 or by e-mail at sdevlin@missoulian.com.
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