Merging Mergansers

By Jeffery Flach

Gorge Views

Niagara Falls is famous for one thing. Unintentionally, we aid the world in the perception that the Falls are a bucket list destination to be visited once in life and in the summer only. Niagara is not a single moment. It is a system. It changes seasonally. It is always living and moving. In the months when tourism is thin and the city starts behaving as if it is on pause, the river keeps gathering life. One of the most underused winter stories in Niagara Falls arrives on wings that look built for speed and water at once: mergansers by the hundreds if not thousands.

Three merganser duck species, each quite distinct, “merge” here—on our river—during the non-peak tourism months: the Hooded Merganser, the Red-breasted Merganser, and the Common Merganser. They are not rare on the continent, but they are reliable here when reliability matters most. And reliability is the first ingredient in any off-season tourism strategy that wants to be more than wishful thinking.

The hooded is the charismatic one—the one that looks like a small creature designed by an artist who didn’t believe in subtlety. A black-and-white fan of a crest, a bright eye, a compact body that disappears into the current and reappears like a punctuation mark.

The red-breasted is the wild one—spiky, restless, salt-water heritage in a freshwater city, a bird that wears “windblown” as an identity.

The common is the strong one—clean lines, larger frame, a confident hunter that can make the river look like a working landscape rather than a scenic background.

Each is interesting alone. But the real opportunity is in the fact that they appear together, in the same place, at the same time, when our local economy most needs new reasons for people to show up. Because these ducks already merge here. No additional infrastructure is needed; however, better story telling is needed. That starts with local awareness. If we become aware and start sharing the story of the mergansers with the world then we can merge the mergansers into our economic revival, a small but easy step towards progress.

Right now, our tourism narrative behaves like a funnel. It concentrates visitors at the Falls, accelerates them through a narrow loop, and ejects them. Efficient for the single spectacle; inefficient for the city. The off-season becomes the clearest proof of that inefficiency: when the core attraction becomes colder, the city grows quieter, and the local economy accepts lower output as if it is natural law. But it isn’t natural law. It is design and one we can change.

Here is the simple shift: stop treating winter and shoulder seasons as “less Niagara,” and start treating them as “another Niagara,” as a version of the city that is more intimate, more ecological, more discoverable, and therefore more repeatable. Mergansers are perfect for this because they do something the waterfalls cannot do on their own. A merganser invites attention. It pulls visitors up and down river, towards quieter overlooks, movement becomes dispersal. This is not ideology. It is visitor psychology and economic logic braided together.

What would it look like to merge mergansers with peak-season storytelling? It’s showing photos in hotel lobbies with captioning that tells people when and where the photos were taken, the same in restaurants. It’s our DMO, placing their story in its annual magazine. From May through September visitors should hear, loud and clear, that Niagara is a world-class river corridor full of life from October through April. That the birds arrive when the crowds leave. That the spectacle doesn’t vanish - it changes form. We package it, not as a gimmick but as a seasonal invitation.

A Merganser Festival is one obvious anchor: a small, smart, off-season event that gives birders, naturalists, photographers, families, and the simply curious a reason to plan a trip, not just “maybe stop by.” Guided river walks. Short moments in warm indoor spaces. Photo meetups. A “three-species challenge.” Gamified photo competitions that are shareable with the world through social media. Contests that can be judged, a free drink or meal for the best 3 species photos shown at a local restaurant on a given day. Hotels can offer a room comp for best photo or simply award it with being immortalized on one of their walls to inform next year’s guests of the merganser opportunity.

It requires all of us to become better narrators of what is already happening. When we understand our own ecology, we stop being a postindustrial city and start being a globally significant city again. A city that hosts life at an immense scale, season after season. And when we tell that story well, we don’t just attract more visitors. We attract a better kind of visitation: attention-based tourism, repeat tourism, learning-based tourism, the kind that strengthens our local economy while telling the world the larger story of why the waterfalls matter.

Niagara Falls does not need to invent an off-season. We already have one. It is written on the river in winter light: three mergansers, merged in one corridor, waiting for us to notice what they are telling us; “The city is still alive.”