Source: Department of Conservation
Perhaps you know your Daffy from your Donald, your Huey from your Louie and Dewey, but do you really know your ducks?
Communications and Media Advisor Krysia Nowak takes a duck-dive into the shallows for a quick wade around the ducks of Aotearoa.
Mallard-y
I’m starting with the obvious. Undoubtably, the most common and most basic (*cough*) of all our ducks is the mallard.
An introduced dabbling duck (more on this in a moment), mallards are everywhere, all up in your face, and nibbling your toes. Acclimatisation societies begun by European colonists introduced, bred, and released mallards extensively from the 1870s to the 1970s – by which time mallards had become the most common waterfowl in the country.
Female mallards are brown speckled specimens, and the males – like many in the bird world – have more glamorous feathered appearances.
What’s a dabbler?
Apparently, a dabbler is someone who takes a slight interest in a topic for a short period, but I won’t judge you for your hobby-hopping.
For ducks, being a dabbler is feeding by poking around with the bill in shallow water, accompanied by some scandalous upending behaviour displaying their rump for all to see (potentially causing quite a flap in some circles!).
Grey ducks/pārera
Despite their dreary name, these dabblers are adorable with their eye stripes and speckled bodies – and they’re almost indistinguishable from female mallards. Native to Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands, these nationally critical cuties are possibly among our most endangered ducks, and in some ways our most difficult to protect. They face the normal threats (habitat loss, predators), but a far more insidious threat faces pārera: hybridization.
Hybridization occurs when animals of different species reproduce together; their offspring may show different features from the different parents, they may be sterile, or as in the case of pārera x mallard, able to reproduce further.
Mallards (see above) have a dastardly habit of hybridizing with our endemic pārera, meaning the New Zealand population of grey duck may be forever lost to the overwhelming genetics of the introduced mallard.
We might be watching one of our species disappearing in front of our eyes – and we have no way to stop it; but maybe it’s just nature doing its thing.
How to tell pārera and mallards apart? Alas, it’s almost impossible if you aren’t an expert. There’s a whole key to help photographers accurately identify their sightings. Hybrids of mallard and pārera combine the features of each in a multitude of ways. This inconsistency is their downfall; we actually aren’t even sure if there are any pure pārera left in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Pārera are native to other places, so they aren’t going to disappear completely from the world. The best thing we can do for pārera in Aotearoa is to look after our freshwater and be decent to ducks – check out the tips below.
Being decent to ducks
- Be a responsible cat owner, by:
- Keeping your cat indoors or contained inside a ‘catio’, especially at night
- Putting your cat in a cattery when you go on holiday
- Never taking them onto public conservation land.
- Be a responsible dog owner
- Please don’t feed ducks, feeding wild birds can:
- Make them sick or make them starve because they are eating the wrong things
- Make them gather in high numbers, spreading disease (we’re especially wary of this with H5N1 avian influenza spreading overseas)
- Increase risks to human health by increasing the concentration of bird faecal matter
- Trap introduced predators at home or in your community
Make sure to keep an eye out for Ducktales: Episode 2 and 3, still to come!
