The Canadian cold front had passed during the early morning and now the temperatures were plummeting. Ice began forming on the decoys and a strong westerly wind blew unmercifully. Late-season duck hunters are familiar with the tail end of the duck season on big water. The first real wintry conditions push the last flights of ducks and geese southward. Included in these late flights are black ducks, mallards, canvasbacks, scaup, mergansers, goldeneyes and buffleheads.

     The bufflehead is not especially sought after by waterfowlers, but their tendency to decoy readily and increased abundance late in the season accounts for more of them finding their way into the game bag. Hunters, who go out of their way to put out two or three bufflehead decoys off to the side of their normal set, will find that the little bufflehead offers some good late-season gunning.

     The bufflehead or "butterball" as it is so often called is 14 -15 inches in length and weighs about a pound. It was originally known as the "buffalo head," because of its unusually shaped, puffy head. Time and the slurred words from cold lips of late-season duck hunters in the duck blind, probably resulted in a shortened version—"bufflehead".

     The bufflehead is a short, stubby duck with a big head and small bill. The male has a dark head set on a mostly white body. The head is glossed with purple, violet and green, with a rounded, triangular-shaped white patch behind its eye at the back of its head. Its undersides are white with gray-edged flanks and a dark greenish-black back, lighter towards the tail. The hen is also dark-backed and white-bellied with gray sides and breast, and a white cheek patch on a brownish-gray head. 

     Both sexes have white speculums and the drake has white wing coverts and bright pink feet. His bill is bluish-black while the hen's is dull black with touches of gray and pinkish-gray feet. At a distance on the water, the bufflehead can be confused with the hooded merganser, which also has a white patch visible when it fans its crest. In shape and silhouette, the bufflehead resembles the goldeneye, a larger duck that also shows up in late-season.

     The breeding range of the bufflehead extends from southern Quebec to Alaska, including parts of northwestern United States. It nests primarily in the parklands or bush country, north and west of the prairies of Canada. Its nest is built in a tree hollow, much like the wood duck's. Usually it’s an old woodpecker hole in which the entrance hole is enlarged to a little more than three inches in diameter to accommodate the chubby body of the bufflehead. The cavity is normally five to 40 feet off the ground near or over water. Occasionally the nest is a hole in a dirt bank, possibly an old kingfisher nest hole.

     An average clutch of 11 eggs is laid and, when they hatch, the young vacate the nest by jumping out! Somehow they survive the fall, looking like bouncing balls of cotton as they drop to the ground or water. The hen quickly leads them to the safety of a nearby parkland pond where they grow rapidly on a diet of insects, vegetation, seeds, and finally crustaceans, mollusks, and small fish. Upon reaching adulthood, about 80 percent of the bufflehead's food is animal matter, mostly obtained by diving.

     With the coming of cold weather, the bufflehead moves to its wintering grounds in Chesapeake Bay and the South Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. Many of them remain in the north as long as open water is available and they have a ready food supply. The Great Lakes and the large rivers of the Mississippi Drainage host numerous buffleheads.

     Duck hunters know them as fast fliers, traveling low over the water in small flocks made up of mostly females and juveniles, along with a couple of older drakes. Their wings beat rapidly and they land with splashing slide. Most of the time they prefer to dive and swim to escape danger rather than to fly. Like all diving ducks, they run over the surface to become airborne, although they seems to get off the water much quicker than most.

     The bufflehead gets very fat in late-fall, which earned it the tag "butterball" from waterfowlers. It is not ranked high as a table bird, because of its diet, but those birds that may have been feeding heavily on vegetation can be quite delectable providing a gourmet treat to late-season hunters.

     Some of the better bufflehead hunting takes place on the Rappahannock River in Virginia. For those who want to "hunt" buffleheads with a camera or just watch them, there are a number of places in Virginia to go. They can be found on reservoirs large and small and on most tidal rivers during the winter. Some specific places to look for buffleheads are the York River (along the Colonial Parkway), Popes Creek along the Potomac River, the lower Rappahannock River, and any of the rivers and creeks off Chesapeake Bay, as well as the bay itself; any place where there is a good supply of mollusks and crustaceans. 

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