This is it for photo contributions (save for singletons), so please send in your good wildlife photos. Many thanks!
Today’s photos feature DUCKS, and come from reader Jan Malik. (There are other bird’s too.) Jan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Here are a few common birds from Cape May (the peninsula where the namesake town is located) taken last week. The area with marshes, sand dunes and freshwater ponds at the southern tip of the peninsula next to the lighthouse is called The Meadows. Spring migration has just started but animal traffic was rather light.
Mallard drake (Anas platyrhynchos) viewed from a blind. Hens stayed farther away, in reeds thicket:
A bromance? In the past I have observed and photographed mallard drakes courting one another, so this would be nothing unusual:
No, this is just one male running off a competitor from the pond:
Gadwall (Mareca strepera), hen and drake. This is a cosmopolitan duck species, widespread in Eurasia’s and America’s temperate zone. “Strepera” in Latin presumably means “noisy”, but these remained quiet; I suppose a drake can be quite vocal when courting:
The Gadwall drake is less flamboyant than males of other dabbling ducks, but they are patterned with fine gray and brown streaks in breast feathers and black rump patches. That, plus overall neat and symmetrical plumage, speculum visible when flying and vigorous behavior when courting, is perfectly sufficient for a hen to select a mate. I think this humble plumage evolved due to drakes’ staying longer near the nest than many dabbling ducks. For some time – until incubation starts – they do guard it. Thus there must be some pressure to evolve inconspicuous coloration:
Gadwall hens are difficult to tell apart from mallards. All I can spot is the lack of a dark band across the eye and a dark bill, unlike yellow in mallard:
An American species, a blue-winged teal (Spatula discors) male. Contrary to the name, not much blue shows on this drake – blue feathers are mostly revealed in flight:
Blue winged teal, hen. Dark bill and light coloration just behind the bill allow us to tell it is not a mallard, but from a distance these signs are easy to miss:
The teal swam a little too close past the mated gadwalls and the drake let the teal know, not very aggressively but unambiguously, that he was trespassing:
A red-winged blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) was announcing the extent of his territory by his “cankaree” call. There were many males in the marsh but I didn’t see any females – they might not have arrived yet, and even if they did, they prefer to stay out of sight. Males are highly territorial and fiercely defend their territories. Later in the season it is not unusual for a male redwing to attack a human passerby if a nest happens to be too close to a path. I’ve also seen redwings ride a hawk or an eagle, like a cowboy on a bull:
A flock of Snowy Egrets (Egretta thula) descending on a coastal march at sunrise. They are gregarious compared to the Great Egret, can feed together as a group form dense nesting colonies:
