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Be a Better Birder: Duck and Waterfowl Identification

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Be a Better Birder: Duck and Waterfowl Identification Be A Better Birder: Duck and Waterfowl Identification Lesson 5: Identifying “Not Ducks” Welcome to Lesson Five in the waterfowl identification series. Hi, I am Kevin McGowan. This is our final lesson. We will be going over the not-ducks today, things that look like ducks, swim like ducks, act like ducks, but aren’t ducks at all. But some of them are related. That means swans and geese, loons and grebes. Remember that I say to break it down. Break your thing, your categories down into subcategories, and then try to identify from there. Don’t try to identify all of them, pick a category and narrow it down. This time we’ll be dealing with the swans, geese, and not-ducks. We will be going over 20 species in these three groups in this session. Start with swans. Swans are kind of easy. They’re big, long-necked, and they’re white. We have three species to deal with in North America: two native and one introduced. Let’s start with the introduced one, that’s the basic park swan, the Mute Swan. And it’s big and all white, with a long curved neck. That’s one of the things that you may notice, the “swan-like” neck. The Mute Swan has an exaggerated curve in the neck that’s a little different than the other two. Also note that it’s got an orange bill with a black face and a big swollen knob on the top of the bill. The male’s is a little bigger than the female’s, but otherwise the two look alike. Often we will see these birds with their heads and necks stained, kind of yellow or rusty. That’s just from foraging. Don’t worry about that. When the male is displaying he usually holds his wings fluffed up over the back in kind of an aggressive posture. One of the things to note with these guys is that they do have a relatively long tail for a swan. These guys can occur anywhere; they are the park swans. There are breeding populations along the Atlantic coast and in the Great Lakes. Remember white wingtips in flying swans. Trumpeter Swan is another big swan. It is as big as a Mute Swan. But look how different its profile is. It has a long straight neck with very little curve to it. And an all-black face and bill. No yellow or orange on the bill. Although at times you can see a little bit of orange or pink along the gape of the bill. Be ready for that. These guys also get their head and necks stained rusty fairly frequently. The eye is contained within the black of the face. That’s going to be important; we’ll talk about this in just a minute. These guys are fairly noisy. Mute swans aren’t quite mute, but they certainly don’t honk the way the other two species do. Their wings are noisy; they do rasp, make a raspy noise in flight, not whistling like the goldeneye, but more of a raspy thing. The Trumpeter Swan was previously found in the northern Rockies to Alaska. Now it’s been introduced into the Midwest and eastward, and so you never know when this guy is going to turn up. So, be ready for Trumpeter Swans. Tundra Swan looks very much like the Trumpeter Swan. It has a black bill and face. Size is a little smaller, but that’s really hard to tell. Note also that these guys have a yellow spot in front of their eye. It’s kind of variable, with different birds having it to different degrees. Sometimes it can be really yellow, and sometimes it’s completely missing. These birds, true their name, breed on the tundra and then come through most of the rest of North America in migration into winter. So, if you see large, large flocks of swans, chances are they’re Tundra Swans. So how do we tell Trumpeter from Tundra? They both have black faces. It can be a tricky ID. But look them in the eyes. The eyes have it here, just like we talked about some other birds. If there is yellow on the face, if there’s yellow in front of the eye, that’s definitive. That means that this is a Tundra Swan. The Trumpeters won’t have that. Unfortunately, there are, fairly frequently we find Tundra Swan’s without yellow. But the way to look at these guys is that, two things really. The Tundra Swan has more of a rounded head, and a bit of a dished profile, whereas the Trumpeter Swan’s is more or less a straight line all the way down flattened. The Tundra Swan is just a little bit cuter than the Trumpeter Swan. The other big thing, and this is one that I really like to use, is can you see the eye? If you notice the eye standing out away from the black, then it’s probably a Tundra Swan. Notice how the black seems to constrict in front of the Tundra Swan’s eye. And then the eye enlarges at the back. Whereas if we look at the Trumpeter Swan on the other hand, this is kind of a straight line right there, and it is not really opening up so much as it is moving back at a slightly different angle. And that to me is a really good characteristic. One of the other things that these guys have going for them for ID is their sounds. They both honk, but they sound different. The Trumpeter Swan is a bigger bird, has a more rumbly noise. The thing that I like to use is a Canada Goose as a marker, because most people are familiar with Canada Geese. And Trumpeter Swan has a lower call than the goose, and the Tundra Swan has a higher one. Let’s listen. Here’s Trumpeter Swan.[sound] Kind of low and resonant. Let’s listen to the Tundra Swan.[sound] Higher pitched. And so that’s something that you can use to identify these two birds; Trumpeter has a deeper voice. I do not recommend looking at the forehead to distinguish the two species. It’s a popular field mark, but it’s unreliable. It’s hard to see, and it’s hard to know if you actually saw it. For me, it doesn’t seem to be reliable. The way it’s stated is that the Trumpeter Swan’s forehead, if you’re looking at straight on, has a V-shape. And the tundra’s has a U shape. As I say, I don’t really believe it. Let’s take a look here. Here’s a swan that looks to have a fairly strong U shape. But in fact that’s a Trumpeter Swan, a typical Trumpeter Swan. Here we see this is clearly a Tundra Swan here, with yellow in front of the eye, with a nice V-shaped forehead. So I don’t trust that, I don’t think that’s the way to do it. I think it’s more, look for the head shape and the eye prominence. Juvenile swans can be confusing. Especially because Mute Swan’s bill starts out dark, and then turns orange. It gets paler. Whereas the other guys, both other species, start pink and then turn dark. So it’s kind of confusing. You’re going to see juvenile swans with a mixture of light and dark on their bills. Eye prominence is still a really good clue for Tundra and Trumpeter, especially when they’re really young. Look at this. You can see that on a Tundra Swan juvenile the eye doesn’t even look like it’s connected to the black of the face, whereas on the Trumpeter Swan it is. So that can still be a good characteristic for these two. Also the Tundra Swan gets white faster, so in the late season, in the late winter, if the bird is still dark all over it tends to be Trumpeter Swans. The juvenile Tundras are already white. Shape is still good to tell Mute Swan apart: it has a real curvy neck, even as a kid, and it does still have a longer tail. Ok. Here’s a quick quiz. Got to test you. What’s this swan? Have you decided? Obviously it’s a black face, so it’s got to be Tundra or Trumpeter. You have a 50-50 chance. And it is a Trumpeter Swan. Did you get that right? There’s a small point of confusion here, possibly. There’s a small bright spot on the bill. That’s simply a highlight, a reflection of the sunlight off the wet bill. This was a sunny day. So be careful. There are places to be confused about these things, but still a very flat profile, and the eye is pretty much the same width as the end of the black of the face. Alright, let’s turn to the geese. There are six common species of geese, and a couple more rare visitors. The sexes all look alike. Here we get lots of patterns of black and white. But watch for white besides the face. All of these birds have white under the tail, but look at the sides too. Notice that the Greater White-fronted Goose has a thin broken line going up the side. Brant have these kind of messy white patches on the side.
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