ON THE WILD SIDE Skills in spades
YOU might see some interesting sights on river and pond banks. Great crested grebes are starting their elaborate courtship displays, and herons are building their huge nests high in the trees.
WE all love a bird that is easy to identify, and this week I’m going to talk about an unmistakable duck.
As with most of our wildfowl, now is the time to look for them as we have a huge influx of continental birds on our lakes and ponds. We have fewer than 1,000 shoveler in summer, but numbers swell to 20,000 in winter. Let’s find out why its Latin name means spatula shield.
The Northern shoveler, to give his full name, is a very handsome duck.
The male has a shiny green head, as you might expect from a duck, with a bright white chest, a rusty chestnut-red belly, and stripes of bright green and blue on his wings.
The female is a little more plain, looking like a standard mottledbrown female mallard.
This strange fowl gets its name from its beak. It’s nearly 6.5cm long, flattened like a spade, and adorned with more than 100 “teeth” like those of a comb. They are the most competent “dabbling” duck in the UK and often swim slowly, swinging their head with their beak just under the surface of the water, filtering out tiny insects, crustaceans and bits of plants.
Since they are so specialised they have nothing to fear from letting in competition, so in the winter will often group up with other dabbling ducks to form multispecies flocks. In summer they are very much a bird of marshes and shallow wetlands, but in winter they are found anywhere with water. As with most ducks the males are more aggressive during breeding season, but after that they all flock together and moult their feathers at once. During that time they are flightless and hide in tall grass and reeds to evade predators.
Once they can fly again, they all migrate south, with Britain holding a fifth of the entire north-west European population in winter.
In summer, the female makes a nest in long grass relatively far away from open water and relies on camouflage to protect them.
If a predator finds the nest, she will poop all over the eggs before she runs away, hoping it will make them less palatable. What a mum!