DELMAR, N.Y. — The Niagara River corridor from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario is renowned as a spectacular winter haven for hundreds of thousands of water birds.
This year's bitterly cold season has made it notable for something else: dead ducks.
Biologists say carcasses began piling up by the hundreds in early January when plunging temperatures started icing over nearly the entire Great Lakes, preventing the ducks from getting to the minnows that are their main source of food. Necropsies on dozens of birds have confirmed the cause: starvation.
“All have empty stomachs. They're half the weight they should be,” said Connie Adams, a biologist in the New York Department of Environmental Conservation's Buffalo office who has seen 950 dead birds.
“This is unprecedented. Biologists who've worked here for 35 years have never seen anything like this,” she said. “We've seen a decline in tens of thousands in our weekly waterfowl counts.”
It's a phenomenon that has been observed elsewhere along the Great Lakes, with news reports of diving ducks and other waterfowl turning up dead by the hundreds along the southern part of Lake Michigan. They've been found in Lake St. Clair between Lakes Erie and Huron, too.
“It's a hard winter for ducks, like everything else,” said Russ Mason, wildlife director with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.
Necropsies and toxicity analyses showed many of the Michigan ducks were subsisting on invasive zebra mussels, which caused the birds to have potentially toxic levels of selenium,.
According to federal monitors, ice pushed across 92.2 percent of the Great Lakes' surface area this winter, just shy of the 94.7 percent record set in 1979.
There is evidence some waterfowl tried to fly farther south but were too weak.
