ok,so, thinking out loud, how would it be if Grey Duck sexes (or maybe ads v imms) had different coloured bills?? Is the image below of 2 "Grey Ducks" at Bexley Wetlands, CHCH, actually a male and female??
- Grey Duck NZ1.JPG (149.31 KiB) Viewed 2439 times
Now, before people start to snort and huff and says its pretty unlikely you'd get pure or near pure Grey Ducks on CHCH urban waterways, think again - if we have massive influxes of thousands of hinterland-breeding Grey Teal, Shoveler, Paradise Shelduck and probably a proportion also of our wintering Scaup pop, not to mention a doubling of Pukeko numbers with a large in-migration - why wouldn't the age-old dispersal/migration/movt pattern of inland and southern breeding birds moving into coastal Canterbury wetlands not also include our once most abundant native waterfowl species??
We find Harrier or botulism killed Grey Ducks at the Bromley ponds on the banks sometimes and therefore have the luxury of checking off every visible ID point - and each one ticks off correctly. Heck, if we added olive billed and orange leg birds in there, nos of "Greys" would move from a very small number to a substantially higher one.
Anyway, here's a couple of ("in my view") very good candidates for Grey Duck - the first from the beach at Lake Taupo, the 2nd from a site on the E coast of Northland:
- NZ Grey Duck3.JPG (187.32 KiB) Viewed 2439 times
- Grey Duck x.JPG (93.45 KiB) Viewed 2402 times
I think the bill colour and leg colour should be ignored, and more focus made on green speculum (arrowed on both pics) with single white band, wide eye stripe and "sticky-out" cheek bones. People's thought now I've thrown in those sticks of dynamite?!!