Gay Mallards?

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 47

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

It is now mid-October around halfway through our southern Spring, and the dunelake remains very dry for this time of year. We have had only a third of our usual rainfall, and this is concerning because two years ago when the lake dried up in early December there followed one of our most serious national droughts.

It is lower now than it was then in mid October, so is the dune lake predicting another major drought? We’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile we are still not getting the rich variety of birds that we usually see down here at this time of the year. 

Tete - Grey Teal -Bright red eye usually indicates a male

One rather young looking tete (grey teal) cruised in for a look/see and a feed and was chased by a hopeful mallard male, while a pair of poaka (pied stilts) have been feeding, off and on for a week now. The female (foreground) has been acting broody but so far there is no sign of them nesting.

Poaka - Pied Stilt. Female in foreground

 Even the mallards and parera-cross ducks are getting thin on the ground though we continue to be puzzled by the parental behaviour of the males.

There have been at least four sets of ducklings come out on the lake so far, but the mothers have had a far from easy time in protecting their young. The males will occasionally stay with the females after the ducklings emerge. These are usually grey-headed parera-cross males, not the green headed mallard though the females remain constantly on the lookout whenever males  are around. We haven’t seen any actually harming youngsters, though the females react as if that is a real possibility and male stalking behaviour does separate the ducklings from their mothers.  They can be aggressively courted to a point where a female will sometimes abandon her brood entirely.

It is all a bit bewildering, for it creates an environment where the youngsters are hard put to survive, especially as there are so many other predators on the lookout and waiting an opportunity to zero in on them. To have the males creating such chaos doesn’t appear to be a successful evolutionary strategy that would support the ducks longer term survival, but somehow they do (survive)… And what a contrast this makes with the maternal behaviour of the pukeko. Here is some footage so you can judge for yourself. The camera work is a little handheld at times because its hard keeping up with them, but it still gives an idea of females under siege from their own.

And just to remind us that we really do know next to nothing about these birds, along comes a conundrum like this one. Here is footage of a mallard pair, that have settled in the Wharemauku in the last few days. They look like  a male-female pair, and act like a male-female pair, but are in fact two males. Their size, the red breast, the green stripe along the top of the ‘females’ head and the curl in their tails, are the giveaways.

From this it would appear that these birds have the same kind of gender complexity in their relationships that we do.

Finally we send a haere mai to all our German friends. Though if you live near Hanover we may very well be distant cousins, because one branch of our family set out from that region to settle  here in the Antipodes in the mid-19^th Century.

Track we were listening to while posting this Leadbelly’s Bourgeois Blues.

I tell all the coloured folks to listen to me

Don't try to find you no home in Washington DC

Cause its a bourgeois town 

Got the bourgeois blues

Gonna spread the news around

Jill Studd's Blog

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