What the Duck?

Here I am in California, an intern for a raptor observatory, so naturally the first bird I banded out here was a ... mallard duck?

Quack!

Fellow GGRO intern Emma's sister Rosa is currently working on a waterfowl banding project in a natural area called Siusun, about an hour and a half north of San Francisco. Waterfowl have the highest recovery rate of any banded birds, due to hunting. So there has been a recent push in California to band more waterfowl and find out how many ducks born in the Golden State actually stay here.

In the last year, I've gotten a chance to observe songbird banding, hawk banding, and owl banding, so it was fascinating to see the similarities and differences that exist in duck banding. As the head of the Minnesota Zoo bird show once told me: "ducks are just really funny animals and always make people laugh." The light-hearted and jovial attitude that seemed to pervade our duck banding experience seems to only confirm that theory.

To catch the ducks, Rosa sets up traps in the water, full of lots of delicious bait (in this case, wheat). The ducks can get in through a narrow entrance, but it is designed so that escape is a much trickier ordeal, although as I witnessed today, not altogether impossible. Every morning and evening, Rosa (or another waterfowl banding technician) checks the traps, and uses a net to extract the ducks, placing them in a carrying case, which she uses to transport them back to her truck where the bands await.

The duck traps, located in the middle of the pond.

Extracting the ducks from the trap.

Ducks, waiting for some bling.

The ducks in this habitat are typically either mallards of gadwalls - the first task when removing a duck from the crate is to decide which one. As ducklings, the only way to tell is to measure the diameter of the leg as each species wears a different sized band. As they continue to get their first full juvenile molt, mallards will begin to show the characteristic blue/green, iridescent bands on their wings. Once the species is determined, the band is affixed to the left leg of the duck.

Ooh, shiny.

Affixing a band to a female mallard (and you will notice that I'm stupidly putting it on the wrong leg).

Throughout this process, the ducks would show varying levels of passivity. For the more boisterous of the bunch, Rosa showed us how to put the ducks into a "burrito hold" to calm them down. Essentially, we would stick the duck's head under its wing, and it would immediately stop flailing so much.

Once the band is on, the next step is to determine the sex. There are sometimes clues on the feathers and bill. For example, female mallards sometimes show speckling on their yellow bill. However, to be sure there's no confusion, we had to check between the legs. As it turns out, ducks are the only birds to actually exhibit penises, so if a penis is found dangling out of the duck's cloaca, that's pretty conclusive evidence that it is a male.

Female mallard bill. To protect the privacy of the ducks, no cloaca photos have been posted.

Next up is age. While trapping ducks this summer, Rosa has yet to trap a non-hatch-year duck (meaning that all of the ducks trapped were born this spring). Whether this has to do with there being just so many more hatch-years than non-hatch-years, or whether the adults leave earlier for migration, or whether the adults are just smarter, Rosa could not say. As the ducklings molt into ducks, they would slowly replace their down with feathers. We examined how much down the ducklings had to see how far along they were in molting. If a duck was fully molted, we checked the tail feathers. Notched tail feathers indicated a hatch-year duck, like all the ducks we saw today.

Notched tail feathers - this duck was born this spring.

Lastly, we needed to get a weight. The obtainment of the ducks' weights was a great example of their resiliency throughout the process compared to other birds I've seen banded.

Anna weighs a duck.

Once all the data is collected and recorded, the ducks are free to be released back into their habitat.

It was pretty cool to dip my toes into waterfowl banding today. In addition to the ducks, we saw a ton of other great wildlife including a number of great egrets, Northern harriers, white-tailed kites, a common moorhen, and a herd of ten elk! While I enjoyed banding the ducks, it also made me all the more excited to get going with the raptor research. Three weeks until the migration season begins!

Wandering Waterfowl

Last week, Erin, being the local animal expert, got a phone call about a "duck" that was stuck in a puddle by the fire-house. She went to check it out and found a pied-billed grebe, unable to walk out of the puddle onto the land and unable to take off into flight. Erin rescued it, let it swim around in her bath-tub for a couple hours (to assess whether it was ready to be released or if it required further care) and then decided it was fine to be released back into the waters of Lake Superior.

Pied-billed Grebe (Podilymbus podiceps) (Photo from: www.allaboutbirds.org)

This is not an uncommon situation this spring. The wildlife rehabilitation center in Duluth has seen a huge increase in the number of grebes admitted and it all has to do with our terrible weather. It has been unusually cold and snowy this "spring", even for the North Shore. Thus, when the migratory waterfowl have returned north, they have found their typical inland lake and stream habitats completely frozen over. In the case of this grebe (and apparently many others) it mistook a puddle for a body of water in its search for suitable habitat.

Raven Lake: Still Frozen

Wolf Lake: Still Frozen

Grebes are a family of waterfowl, related to ducks only in that they both spend time on the water. Pied-billed grebes are built with their legs so far back on their bodies that if they attempt to walk on land, they fall over, top-heavy. A grebe in a puddle is an unfortunate situation because it can't walk onto the land and doesn't have enough water to properly take off, so it is stuck. Grebes are incredibly well adapted to life on the water: in fact, their toes are all individually webbed (as opposed to ducks, which have toes webbed together) providing extra surface area and increasing the efficiency of the paddling. Furthermore, they are great divers, earning the colloquial nickname "Hell-diver" because of the amount of time spent underwater. When underwater, the grebe can compress its feathers to force the air out, causing it to become denser and sink further and faster. Pied-billed grebes even build their nests on floating vegetation in the water!

A pied-billed grebe nest (Photo courtesy of: the internet somewhere)

With no inland lakes to land on, the migratory waterfowl has resorted to hanging out on Lake Superior. Our executive director noted 17 different waterfowl species on the lake during a recent visit. At Palisade Head on Monday, I was able to see at least 15 distinct groups of waterfowl on the lake, some so far away I had no way of identifying species, even with my binoculars. In the past week, much of the Baptism River and Sawmill Creek have become unfrozen, so it is not uncommon to see the summer residents hanging out on these rushing water sources as well.

A trio of hooded mergansers on the Baptism River (5/1)

A pair of ring-necked ducks on the Baptism River (5/1)

Today, atop Marshall Mountain, I saw multiple loons flying by, calling as they searched for open water. Unfortunately, they'll have to continue to be patient, at least for another week or two, before their ideal habitat has melted and is accessible to begin nesting once more.