BirdNote Links
BirdNote Archives
 
|
Fancy Ducks Transcript-430
BirdNote ®
Fancy Ducks
Written by Bob Sundstrom
This is BirdNote!
[Mallards and Green-winged Teal, calling and quacking]
Take a walk around any local pond or lake in late November, and you’ll find ducks in their most brilliant breeding colors. The male or drake Mallards [Mallards] sparkle their greenest on their heads and necks, and their bills are now golden yellow. Green-winged Teal males are at full luster [Green-winged Teal], every detail of their complex plumage precisely delineated. Male Northern Shovelers [Northern Shovelers] have regained their deep emerald head-feathers and rich brown flanks.
After months of molting out of their nondescript late-summer feathers, known as “eclipse plumage,” male dabbling ducks look their finest in late fall and winter... [Mallards and Green-winged Teal, calling and quacking] …because for most ducks, this is the season of courtship and pair-bonding. Males display and chase females and fend off other males, to win a mate with whom they’ll migrate in spring to their nesting grounds. That’s a schedule quite different from the usual timetable of songbirds, which sing and court and find mates in the spring, after migrating to a nesting area.
‘Tis the season for duck-watching, when the showiest perform at the top of their art.
[Mallards calling and quacking]
You’ll find four seasons’ worth of birds in the 2010 “Birds of BirdNote” calendar. It’s available at our website, BirdNote.org. I’m Michael Stein.
###
Calls of the ducks provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Mallard recorded by A.A. Allen, Northern Shoveler and Green-winged Teal recorded by W.W.H. Gunn.
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Chris Peterson
© 2009 Tune In to Nature.org Revised for Nov. 2009
ID# old: 112305MALLKOHO duck-02b-2009-11-16-MS
|
|
