As we come to the penultimate Estate Find for the year, I have to admit that, while a few of them were punted or downright skipped, there was still a surprising amount of new finds, observations, behaviors, and so on. And here we add another new species, at least to me and to the blog:
My exposure to the varied duck species of North America has been fairly limited, and so I wasn’t in the habit of looking for the subtle differences displayed here until they became a little more obvious at that one point in the video. My go-to guide for avian identification has been The Sibley Guide to Birds, which has easily been the best desk reference that I’ve ever had; it features not just male and female plumage differences, but juvenile to adult and seasonal as well, plus range and calls. Nonetheless, it remained a little inconclusive in this case since the illustrations didn’t fully display that color difference between the cheeks and crown, while at the same time they enhanced the body feather variations, which are normally quite muted. Luckily, I had a variety of images that I could refer to, such as this sequence:
The duck to be identified in the back, with a known female mallard in the front, both flapping their wings simultaneously in close proximity and thus allowing both comparison and a glimpse at feathers normally hidden. We see the black duck has no with banding alongside the deep blue secondary feathers on the wings, and has white underwings; no other species has these two traits together. Leg and bill color and relative size also helps, and finding more images of the species online, including at CornellLabs’s All About Birds site. That said, it is far, far easier to flip through the pages of the Sibley Guide to compare plumage among many species.
We’re curious to see what else might be showing up in the future. Neighbors down at the opposite end of The Bayou have seen hooded mergansers in the past, and I’ve seen a flotilla of North American ruddy ducks not too far away, though those are certainly more inclined to open water. We’ve got one more Estate Find to go, though this really isn’t setting any limit on what can be added, just what I can still feature within the year. We’ll see, won’t we?