Getting Familiar With The Three Ducks and "Bird Facts!" 11

Hello peoples! Finally here comes the Getting Familiar With...! This time we will be Getting Familiar With The Three Ducks, the Mallard, the Teal and the Shoveller. I have already done the Three Geese, now I am doing the Three Ducks, and to get the full Anatidae set, all I need is the Three Swans, the Whooper, the Bewick's and the Mute. They are the only UK swans, so that will be perfect. Well, on with the ducks. As you will know, there are loads more ducks than these three to meet, but these three are good ducks to start with: common, distinctive and beautiful. They are also fairly friendly. I promise I was spending all the time when you was only getting "Bird Facts!" posts (the hornbill and Golden Eagle ones were quite pathetic lengths but they were facts) was spent on making this one good. It is rather small, but if the whole three duck ID's do not show, click the READ MORE button. Please.

Duck Terms

Dabbling or diving?

There are two groups of ducks, not based on genetics or plumage, but behaviour. They are the "diving ducks" and the "dabbling ducks". Diving ducks dive underwater for their food and dabbling ducks "dabble" the surface with their bills or "up-end" with their tails in the air. The three ducks we will be meeting today are dabbling ducks. The Shoveller is an exaggerated version of this with the huge spatulate bill, but we will learn more on that later.

Nails 

The "nail" of a fowl is a horny plate on the end of the bill. It appears on adult waterfowls' bill-tips as a bump or point, usually of a different colour to the rest of the bill. The birds use it as a tool for feeding, using it to scrape for insects or seeds, whether it be on the ground in a dabbling duck or a swan or goose or on the pond- or river-bed for a diving duck. 

the head of the Mute Swan cob. The black tip is the nail.

  

Speculums (well the real plural is "specula" but I prefer speculums. It sounds better.)

Ducks (especially the dabbling ducks for some reason) are one of my favourite families of birds. The best thing about dabbling ducks to me, and I know it will sound very odd, is their speculums! Speculums if you are wondering are the brightly coloured and generally iridescent or shiny (on some ducks pure white) patches of conspicuous feathers on the wings of ducks formed by the secondaries. They come in many colours and below are two duck species showing off their shiny speculum wing bling!

a Pacific Black Duck with her large and lovely (alliteration was intended there) green speculums.

a pair of Bronze-winged Ducks have fantastically fiery (alliteration not intended this time I promise!) red speculums.

Sexes (I may as well say that a hatchling is called a duckling (duh) too).

The sexes of ducks have different names. I may as well say all of the waterfowl sex names: A male duck is called a drake, a female is simply just a duck. A male goose is a gander, a female is just plain goose. A male swan is a cob, a female is a pen.

 The Ducks

The Mallard

the duck Mallard

Everyone knows the drake Mallard! Even if you have never seen a wild Mallard (very surprising if you haven't), you may have seen a domestic duck or at the very least, photos or illustrations of them. Every domestic duck in the world (except a domestic Muscovy) is a Mallard.  Just one with slightly demented plumage, albeit some domestic duck plumages are quite nice. I will do a whole post on domestic ducks with similar plumage to the wild-form Mallard. The drake makes hardly any noise except hissing at intruders to the territory. The duck will quack and purr to her ducklings.

the drake Mallard

 I think I'm getting the hang on diagrams on Paint now!!! The drake Mallard's yellow bill with a black nail is eye-catching. The duck's is dark with some pale patches. The bottle-green head of the drake can simply look dark in poor light or when silhouetted against the light (see my post about the Leigh Park Gardens waterfowl-watch). He has white rectrices (true tail-feathers) and contrasting black vent, rump and uppertail coverts. The uppertail coverts are a good identification feature for far-away or silhouetted drake fowl. They are (and only in the drake) curled up in little "ringlets", more easy to see on other photos of mine (again take a look back at the Leigh Park Gardens post).

the delightful violet-blue speculum of the Mallard, outlined in
white and black lines. This was a bird caught in the US for
ringing or "banding" as they call it over there.

The speculum of the Mallard, both sexes (the speculum of a duck is always present on both the duck and drake), is a bright violet-blue colour and it also has a shiny metallic sheen, as does the drake's head. The speculum is outlined with black, and then again with white. 

The Mallard flies by gliding between shallow wing-flapping. The female of this duck often quacks in flight, but the male is quite silent. This would make a good "Bird Facts!": The females of ducks you say are dull, but I think they are attractive in their own mottled brown way.  The female Mallard is the only species of duck in the whole world that quacks! Individuality epicness shows through in the commonest of ducks hahahaha!!! 

Another good note on Mallards is that you nearly always see them (in the breeding season) in groups of three: two drakes following one duck. The dominant drake will have a brighter yellow bill and a shinier head.

The Shoveller (the Northern Shoveller)

Apologies if I have spelt Shoveller as Shoveler in the past. Peter H. Barthel and Paschalis Dougalis (author and illustrator of the New Holland European Bird Guide) spell it with one l but it says in the book that it is the first edition in English so it must be their translator. OH WELL. I thoroughly recommend that book to any birder (it comes in many languages) as a field-guide to take out with them on a birdwatch. Anyway, on with the Shoveller. The most distinctive feature of the Shoveller (both sexes) is the long, spatulate bill. SPATULAte means it is flattened and broadened at the end like a SPATULA. 

 The drake is a striking bird. Like the drake Mallard he has a dark bottle-green iridescent head (this must be a fashionable thing among ducks!) but is is even more striking against hid snow-white breast. He has a yellow eye that shows up well against the green. His wide bill is dark, as are his upperparts. He has chestnut flanks and underparts. When standing, sleeping or swimming, the white on the breast runs back along the side to join the blue forewing. The speculum is metallic green with a white...

the superb green speculum of
the Shoveller with it's white wedge.
Yes, I used the snipping tool on
windows 7 and snipped this from
a full photo.

the drake Shoveller

the duck Shoveller. Sorry if you can't read the blue writing. It says "blue-grey forewing just visible here". 

...wedge above it. His rectrices are white and so is his vent. The female is like the Mallard, a mottled brown bird. She has an orange eye, not yellow like the male. Her head has no striping on it, a good way of telling a female Shoveller from a duck Mallard. Shoveller are smaller than Mallard but bigger than Teal. The bill is still the best way of telling a duck Shoveller and Mallard apart, unless from a distance in flight. If she is in flight, she has, like the drake, a green metallic speculum with the white wedge. Her forewing is more blue-grey than the drake's.

The Teal (the Eurasian/Common Teal) 

The Eurasian Teal is Britain's smallest duck. Here is a drake next to a duck Mallard to illustrate:

male Teal on left, male Teal's arse on the far left, female Mallard on right and front end of a female Mallard on the far top right. YES I'VE USED THIS PHOTO BEFORE. DEAL WITH IT.

the drake Teal

How fantastic! I have chosen some of our most beautiful ducks (well they are all beautiful but these ones are really beautiful) for my Three Ducks today! I will start with the female Teal this time, as I have started with the drakes of both the others. The duck Teal I think is just as attractive in her speckled and mottled plumage. She has a striking white tail-patch and, like the drake, a bright green speculum.

the duck Teal

What a pretty little duck she is.

the wonderful speculum of the Teal has a black patch in front of it and,
like the Shoveller, a white wedge. It is a different shade of green to the
Shoveller's however. This is a male bird caught for ringing.

distinguishing teals, Green-winged on the left,
Eurasian on the  right.,

And now for the drake. I would say he is not as strikingly coloured or patterned as the drake Shoveller or Mallard; his colours are more subtle. He has a chestnut-red head with a white line from the lore to the bottom of the bill-base, all though this quite hard to see in the field. His bill is black. he has a dark-green "eyepatch" (dark-green must be a very good lady-attractor in duck world!). His breast is creamy with black spotting. His body looks silvery-grey in the field but if you look closely it is really a pattern of black and white lines very close together. When he in on land or in water, where you are most likely to see him, he has a distinctive white streak across his body. At his rear, there is a cream patch bordered with black, then white. In flight, both sexes are most readily identified by the green speculum, a different shade to a Shoveller, with a black patch in front of it, a white wedge above it and a white trailing edge. The white line on the body can be hidden and this poster telling you how to tell a Green-winged Teal from a Common/Eurasian Teal shows this well. There is also a Teal variant  where the "eyepatch" is navy-blue. Either way I like it. I couldn't get any photos of the blue eyepatch variant, then I found some. When I tried to up load it however it epic failed. The site may have a thing so people can't up load it with out permission. And I say fair play to them because nobody wants to have another person claim ownership to a photo that isn't really theirs, but I assure you, I am not trying to say that.


BYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Keep birding!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!