Flightless ducks in the Falklands!! (and two other birds)

November 24, 2019 • 1:00 pm

I’m so excited! As I reported earlier, I’m scheduled to visit Bluff Cove Lagoon in the Falklands this afternoon (East Falkland, to be exact), hoping to see King penguins. (There are plenty of gentoos there, too, but also supposedly a nucleus of Kings sits in the center of the gentoo rookery, and Kings are increasing in numbers here.)

But I spent several hours this morning wandering around Stanley, a small but delightful town: a little bit of Britain holding steady in the South Atlantic, complete with chippies, pubs, and locals with British accents.

On the bus ride into Stanley, I saw a pair of sexually dimorphic ducks near the pier, and I thought, “Could those be. . . . flightless steamer ducks?” For indeed, the Falklands are the only home of the Falkland steamer duck (Tachyeres brachypterus), a flightless duck that’s one of only two birds endemic to the archipelago (the other is  Cobb’s wren).

But our bus moved on, and, when I visited the Historic Dockyard Museum in town, I fell into conversation with one of the lovely elderly ladies who ran the place. It turned out that she used to be a wildlife manager at Bluff Cove, and told me things about the King penguins.

I then asked her “Were those flightless steamer ducks I saw on my way into town?” She said, “Almost certainly; they’re all over the place.” My next question was obvious and laden with anxiety:  “Where can I see them within walking distance?” She said, “Try the War Memorial, just down Ross Road.”

Sure enough, as I wandered by the harborside, I saw two ducklike blobs sitting on a rock. As I approached quietly and slowly, they stayed put, and, sure enough, they were Falkland steamer ducks, clearly a mated pair. (I was told that there won’t be many chicks this season because of weather.)

Here’s a photo; it’s clearly not the similar-looking and congeneric flying steamer duck (Tachyeres patachonicus), for you can see that the wings of these guys are TINY! (They use them for paddling in the water and in inter-male fights.)

I am off in a few minutes, so I didn’t have time to look up the sexual dimorphism, but I suspect the one with the orange bill is the male. Readers are invited to comment below on whether I’m right.

I have a lot more photos of these, but it’s a rare sighting and I wanted to share it now.

I saw two other species on my walk. One was the sexually dimorphic Upland Goose (Chloephaga picta), common in southern South America. The white one is the male. Why is this goose sexually dimorphic while other species aren’t? You tell me. They’re monogamous, but perhaps only socially monogamous, with perhaps a lot of what evolutionist John Maynard Smith called “sneaky-fucking”.

Finally, these birds in the photo below were perched on a pole in the water, and I have no idea what they are. Someone please identify them for me by the time I return at 6 p.m.

A coda: the Wikipedia entry for the flightless steamer duck alludes to Darwin, though it’s not completely clear if he’s talking about the flightless or flying duck:

Charles Darwin devoted two paragraphs to this bird (or the similar flying steamer duck) in The Voyage of the Beagle, having observed them at the Falkland Islands in 1833:

In these islands a great loggerheaded duck or goose (Anas brachyptera), which sometimes weighs twenty-two pounds, is very abundant. These birds were in former days called, from their extraordinary manner of paddling and splashing upon the water, race-horses; but now they are named, much more appropriately, steamers. Their wings are too small and weak to allow of flight, but by their aid, partly swimming and partly flapping the surface of the water, they move very quickly. The manner is something like that by which the common house-duck escapes when pursued by a dog; but I am nearly sure that the steamer moves its wings alternately, instead of both together, as in other birds. These clumsy, loggerheaded ducks make such a noise and splashing, that the effect is exceedingly curious.

Thus we find in South America three birds which use their wings for other purposes besides flight; the penguins as fins, the steamer as paddles, and the ostrich as sails: and the Apteryz of New Zealand, as well as its gigantic extinct prototype the Deinornis, possess only rudimentary representatives of wings. The steamer is able to dive only to a very short distance. It feeds entirely on shell-fish from the kelp and tidal rocks: hence the beak and head, for the purpose of breaking them, are surprisingly heavy and strong: the head is so strong that I have scarcely been able to fracture it with my geological hammer; and all our sportsmen soon discovered how tenacious these birds were of life. When in the evening pluming themselves in a flock, they make the same odd mixture of sounds which bull-frogs do within the tropics.

A bit grim, no? Darwin, like many naturalists of his time, thought little of testing the strength of a duck’s cranium by bashing it with his hammer. Well, I won’t diss him too much on the 160th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. 

23 thoughts on “Flightless ducks in the Falklands!! (and two other birds)”

  1. They are a bit too far away to be totally sure, but I think that the birds in the third photo are rock cormorants, Phalacrocorax magellanicus.

    1. Very similar but king cormorants have a white neck – these are rock cormorants with a black neck and a little white flash behind the eye.

  3. Flightless ducks makes quite good sense. They are protected from predators in many environments and can save energy by staying on the ground or water. Many ducks lose flight during molting, and the western grebe is an example of a bird that can’t fly for the entire summer when it is raising young on a lake. It even loses muscle mass to be regained for migration in the fall.

      1. From Wiki: ‘The common name “steamer ducks” arose because, when swimming fast, they flap their wings into the water as well as using their feet, creating an effect like a paddle steamer.’

  6. About the Upland goose: does the male contribute to the brooding ? It is the case for most of the geese and swans, which are monomorphic, and not for dimorphic ducks where the female only has a cryptic plumage. I have read that the males of the Upland goose are agressively territorial, but didn’t find anything on their brooding habits.

  7. Ah ,the Falklands ,a little bit of Britain in the South Atlantic ,i did read the troops who liberated them from them argies used to refer to the locals as Bennie’s ,a character from the TV soap Crossroads.Those of you who haven’t seen or heard of it ,you are so lucky .Only good thing about it is that it inspired Victoria Wood to write” Acorn Antiques “.

    1. When I visited the Falklands on official duty, I was told that the CBF had instructed all troops to refrain from calling the locals ‘Bennies’ because it was insulting and demeaning. The WO1 who told me this added: ‘The lads now call them ‘Stills’. Why? ‘Because they’re still Bennies, sir’.

    2. I used to listen to the BBC Documentary podcast. They did one on the Falklands and lamented how British and undiverse it was, and how much better the place would be if the Argentinians ruled it. I guess to the BBC braintrust Spanish speaking equals non-white. I unsubscribed after that.

      1. I think there was a view from “the left” (at the time of the conflict) that it would be more just for the Falklands to be governed by an Argentinian military junta.

        1. The war in the Falklands only came about because of the Grantham witch and her cuts ,i don’t mean the rest of the cabinet and i have spelt it properly ,I forget the name of the ship that used to visit the Falklands and was due for the chop ,so that General who looked like George C Scott took a chance and invaded.
          Someone said the war in the Falklands was like two bald men fighting over a comb .

          1. Just another comment ,sometime before the war broke out in 1982 an American was searching for a nice quiet spot to move to .
            After a lot of research he chose the Falklands ,just after he moved there the Argies invaded .

            Just one more comment ,to get their own back on the British ,the Argentina’s removed all the keys off the tins of corned beef they exported to Britain .

          2. – two bald men fighting over a comb –

            That’s something to keep handy. How did I ever miss it?

  9. I am excited and happy for you. Did not know about flightless ducks!
    Yes. Always approach the ‘lovely elderly ladies who run the place’ when needing advice about nature. I did exactly that during a recent trip at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, and it earned me an unforgettable experience that made the whole trip for me.

  10. I spent 4 months in Stanley back in the mid 1980’s. I did a fair bit of bird watching and the steamer ducks were always interesting. They are remarkably powerfully built birds and very, very aggressive. Some of the “flying” steamer ducks can’t fly either, they seem to be on the cusp of losing flight too.

  12. There were house ducks in 1833???

    Why aren’t they depicted in paintings? You see dogs & cats in paintings. Did only poor people have “house ducks?”

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