The duck ponds found in towns across Colorado are not as peaceful as they might first seem. For the ducks who live there, the scene is fraught with life-and-death struggles – and at water’s edge, photographing the action from a duck’s-eye-view, is nature photographer Dan Walters.

He stands on the shore of Kountze Lake in Belmar Park, near his home in Lakewood, to watch the ducks known as common mergansers working hard for their daily meals.

Mergansers are diving ducks that completely disappear beneath the surface of the lake for up to 30 seconds in search of food. At Kountze Lake, that food is often crayfish, also known as crawdads. When the merganser surfaces from its dive, it clutches a crayfish in its long, hooked bill, the pint-sized crustacean’s legs wriggling helplessly in the air.

“They shake the crayfish until its claws and legs fall off,” Walters said. “Then they swallow them whole and dive down to find another one. It’s amazing how many they can eat.”

To capture images of mergansers hunting crayfish and other action shots, Walters relies on skills he honed while training for a career as a sports photographer. That was the career he envisioned until the day he took an impromptu trip to the top of Mount Evans to test out a new camera lens by photographing the baby mountain goats at the summit.

Walters enjoyed wildlife photography so much that he decided to make that his focus. But as cute as baby mountain goats are, he soon gravitated to photographing birds, as the variety of bird species in Colorado is vastly greater than mammal species. “You get so many different seasons, with so many different birds flying in and out of our state, there’s always something to photograph,” he said.

That variety includes ducks. For Coloradans only familiar with mallards, whose males have distinctive green heads, it may come as a surprise that there are at least 20 duck species that spend a significant part of the year in Colorado. March and April are great times to find ducks before certain species continue their migrations elsewhere.

The two main types of ducks are divers and dabblers. Divers, such as the mergansers, go underwater to hunt out prey. Dabblers, which include mallards, mill about on the surface, grazing for whatever plants or insects they find.

Some of the more unusual duck species are often hidden in plain sight, nesting alongside the far more numerous mallards in lakes and ponds near the state’s major population centers. Besides Belmar Park, Walters’ favorite duck spot on the west side of the Denver metro area is Prospect Park in Wheat Ridge. Many types of ducks can be found there, and though they are wild, they are accustomed enough to humans to not be too skittish.

Still, Walters has to take care not to frighten off the ducks before he can take their picture. When photographing diving ducks, he will wait for them to dive, then move closer while they are submerged. He repeats the process until he has scooted up to the shore, where he gets as close to the water’s surface as possible to get on the same level as the ducks.

When most of the lake is frozen, there is often a small patch of open water near the shore where the various duck species congregate, making it easier to photograph many species within a short span. As spring progresses, some species fly north. However, this corresponds with another influx from the south, as snowy egrets, white pelicans and other warm weather birds move into the ducks’ splashing grounds for the next round of Colorado’s year-round avian extravaganza.