Little white duckling or albino?

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 48

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

 

The Wharemauku creek is every ready to throw up a surprise and here is today’s – a white mallard chick with four siblings. 

White mallard duckling with 4 siblings

 There is some controversy over whether a bird like this is a rare albino and genuinely without pigmentation, or a throwback, whose parental lines at one time jumped the fence into a white duck pen. There is a lot of variation in the colouring of local town mallards -from pale pinkish brown to dark parera black- so our guess is that this one has white domestic genes; and the yellowish tinge is probably the giveaway.

White duckling

And perhaps we know the parentage. A full grown white mallard male settled for a time at the lake last year and then was spotted at a number of other more public lakes. So the genes are circulating in the population. He was just as keen to hook up with a female mate as his male rivals, and the females were receptive to him. There seems to be no white colour bar where mallard males are concerned – although there is growing evidence that there is one for grey headed parera males. They don’t seem to be tolerated in green headed cabals.

These ducks aren’t domesticated animals, but neither are they truly wild, because they rely for a good part of their food stocks on local human handouts at public ponds. With one of the main public ponds closed down for renovation, this may be a reason why we are seeing so many mallards at the dune lake this year. Though they have disappeared over the last week leaving the dunelake once again, abnormally quiet for this time of the year.



Flotsam around NIWA pollutant monitor 

Finally – here is an update on Niwa’s creek monitoring prowess. As you can see the pipe remains detached and the flotsam uncleared.

NIWA pollution monitor with detached pipe Nov 5

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Track we were listening to while posting this Burl Ives' -Little White Duck

There's a little white duck, sitting in the water
A little white duck, doing what he oughter
He took a bite of a lily pad
Flapped his wings and he said, "I'm glad
I'm a little white duck sitting in the water
Quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack

Jill Studd's blog

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