I am pleased to now include Tara Tanaka, videographer and creator of the great “Big Red” egret video we saw the other day, as a Reader. With that status, she has permitted me to post her fantastic wildlife videos. Tara and her husband own a 45-acre cypress swamp, providing lots of opportunities for animal shots.
So today, in lieu of Readers’ Wildlife Photographs, I offer one of Tara’s other videos, “Teamwork.” Its subtitle is the sentence, “If it seems to warm and fuzzy, keep watching!” Its a vivid demonstration of the power of kin selection. Here are her notes:
A new and hopefully much improved edit of a video I posted last year. Digiscoped with two independent systems, both using GH4 cameras on Swarovski scopes, shot in 4K using manual focus. Enjoy!
The duck, by the way, is a black-bellied whistling duck, Dendrocygna autumnalis.
Tara’s Vimeo website is here and her flickr site, with lots of photos and videos, is here.
And for your bird aficionados, the Cornell site gives the range of the black-bellied whistler:
That was… well, who needs coffee? Not me.
My heart just filled up 13 times over…..
I have to assume that a lot of babies are lost to depredation in the swamp. Birds of prey, snakes, gators, raccoons…It’s tough out there.
My brother in law’s family has a home on a FL canal. Their new water poodle puppy (5 months) could not resist jumping in for a swim. A ‘gator was close by and took the pup in an instant. Needless to say, the kids were pretty upset.
That sounds horrific!
Oh, how heart-breaking!
Welcome Tara, to the WEIT carnival.
Nice video! I didn’t know that ducks could nest in regular bird nest boxes.
We have a nature preserve a few miles away that keeps similar above-ground boxes for a couple families of wood ducks. I know they prefer to nest well off the ground in tree holes, so it seems the same for these ducks.
Amazing video! So great to be able to capture the chicks’ first moments of freedom and danger.
This species is undergoing a rapid range expansion, probably due to global warming. Once, their U.S. range was limited to south Texas and it was rare to find them as far north as Houston. And now they seem to be traveling up the Mississippi into Tennessee.
I wonder if the gaters are moving north too. It is little things like that that might stir the republican right into trying to slow down global warming.
Yes, they were a fairly common summer bird in Houston 30 years ago, but nothing like the year round hordes these days.
I think they made their way around the Gulf to Florida only in the last twenty years or so.
I checked a few old sources. The Peterson Field Guide (1980) doesn’t mention black-bellied whistling ducks at all, just fulvous. Madge & Burn (1988) show them just a little bit north of Brownsville. And that accords pretty well with my experience in Texas.
I know the Peterson guide thoroughly surveys Eastern Texas, but I know there were at least a good number of whistlers in a few Houston parks by the mid 80’s. I lived near Hermann Park a few years then so I’m pretty sure I’m not mixing things up with ten years later. Maybe this was just a small urban pioneer summer colony, though it does seem odd that Peterson’s would miss it.
When you say “whistlers”, which species are you referring to? Fulvous whistling ducks were present in 1980 (and are in the Peterson guide), but black-bellied whistling ducks, as far as I know, were not.
Pretty sure they weren’t fulvous, but I wasn’t as aware of the distinction back then as I later became.
I wonder if they might be known escapees from the zoo and that’s why they weren’t recorded. Or I could simply have the species mixed up.
I was just trying to clarify. If species are expanding, any published map must lag a bit behind reality, so perhaps Madge & Burn were a little bit out of date by then, or perhaps these Houston ducks were an isolated few. I don’t recall seeing any black-bellied even in Corpus until the 1990s, but I was there only once every year or two. Anyone who really wants to document this should check Christmas count records, which I assume are by now online.
I’ve checked. Black-bellied whistling duck doesn’t show up in the Houston Christmas count until very late: 2005. For whatever that’s worth.
There was one in Michigan last year. They seem to showing up as vagrants far north of their traditional range relatively frequently. Though not enough to not draw huge crowds of birders each time!
Sublime as always, Tara! Glad to have you aboard!
Wow. I’d seen a Facebook meme of ducklings jumping from a box a couple of years ago, but this is sublime with the alligator. Cute and terrifying. Fragile, feather-puffs.
Thanks to all for your nice comments – so great to get to share these.
I think we had our first BBWDs here in Tallahassee, FL about 4 years ago, but 2014 was the first year they successfully nested here (2 broods), and we had 3 broods this year.