It’s amazing what a new beaver pond can bring to a neighborhood near you. As I wrote about last year, a family of beavers has turned a non-descript trickle of water that has typically run most of the year through a narrow slot between two rock outcroppings near our house into a beaver pond that now occupies at least two acres of former forest.

Just over a week ago, a brief blast of warm weather melted the last of our snow and took the ice from the beaver pond— and that open water drew life like a magnet. Frogs, ducks, and other birds all seemed to emerge or arrive at the same time, including, as I soon discovered, several hooded mergansers.

For some of the mergansers, it was probably just a pit stop. But beaver ponds make ideal breeding habitat for hoodies and one pair seemed to show more ownership of the pond than the others. While other mergansers are pretty strictly fish eaters, and likely wouldn’t find much to eat on this beaver pond, that’s not the case with hooded mergansers, which are actually a different genus than the common and red-breasted mergansers that we often see on larger lakes and rivers in our area during the summer. Hoodies are much smaller than their merganser cousins and while they certainly eat fish when available, they’ll also do just fine dining on aquatic insects, snails, frogs, and even vegetation, so a beaver pond offers plenty of food to raise a hungry brood of ducklings.

Hoodies are similar to wood ducks and goldeneyes, in that they nest in cavities, rather than on the ground. And like many other ducks, the male hoodies are only interested in the females of the species during the initial breeding period. That’s right, they’re just in it for the sex. Once the eggs are laid, it’s all up to the female, who finds a nest cavity, incubates the eggs, and tends to the young ones once they’ve hatched.

Fortunately for hoodie mothers, the young are precocious and typically leave their nest within 24 hours of hatching. As with other tree nesting ducks, leaving the nest is a really big step, one that usually means a leap of faith for the young ducklings as they hurl themselves into the air for the long drop to the ground. But the little balls of fluff are rarely injured and within minutes, their mother is leading them through the woods, headed for the nearest water.

Once there, the young ducks pretty much feed themselves. The mother’s job is mostly to keep them all together and to keep watch for predators.

One of the advantages of living in a beaver pond, of course, is that the young hoodies only need to worry about the predators on land or in the air. There are none of the predators of the deep, like big muskie or northerns, that are found on many larger lakes.

Our particular pond, which is still quite new, offers lots of additional cover as well. Much of the area now flooded was once an alder thicket, and the standing dead sticks provide a criss-crossed shield against hawks and owls.

Whether the pair of hoodies I photographed recently at our pond will eventually nest nearby isn’t clear at this point, but I expect they probably will given the many advantages the pond offers to young ducks. I’ll be back regularly in the coming weeks, to keep an eye on activity at the pond, so if she does raise a brood, I’ll be sure to let readers know.