What duck has the largest bill of any duck in North America?
What duck’s bill is longer than its head?
What dabbling duck rarely tips up, bill down, to feed?
What duck occasionally gathers by the dozens for communal feeding?
Which duck’s bill shape is unique among North American waterfowl?
If you answered Northern shoveler to each question, congratulations.
While shovelers are usually seen in small numbers, walkers along Seattle’s Green Lake recently were in for a treat. Several dozens of shovelers had created a few tight circles in the shallow lake, whirling around in the same direction, their bills swinging left and right, feeding as they went along.
The pinwheel motion creates a whirlpool effect, bringing up plant matter, tiny invertebrates, and insects from lower in the water.
As they spin, shovelers lower their heads and skim their broad, elongated shovel-shaped bills, filtering with about 100 well-developed comblike projections along the edges of the bill.
When not spinning, shovelers will use their bill to skim along the surface for food. If they are in shallow enough water, they can stir up the mud with their feet. Water is drawn in at the tip of the bill and expelled at the base.
Shovelers are the fourth most abundant duck on the Pacific Flyway after Northern pintail, mallard, and American widgeon.
Tidbit: If flushed off the nest, a female Northern Shoveler often defecates on its eggs, probably to deter predators.
Another bird that displays the pinwheeling approach to feeding is the phalarope. They, too, spin in tight circles to bring up food. But since a phalarope is a shorebird, it has a thin bill, which it pokes at its food.
They also have skinny sandpiper legs, but can swim very well because of lobed toes.
On another topic: Last month a red-necked phalarope from Shetland, Scotland, made the news because of its “wrong-way” migration, a trip that ranked among the world’s top long-distance migrations.
It had been wearing a tracking device and researchers could have been forgiven if they doubted the signal.
The phalarope headed west (most migrants leaving Great Britain go the easier route with the prevailing winds generally behind them), crossed the North American continent, stopping on the Pacific Ocean off Ecuador and Peru, a first for an European breeding bird, according to a report by BBC Scotland.
Not only did it make it to the Pacific, but it migrated home, a 16,000-mile round-trip, upsetting the conventional wisdom that all of Scotland’s phalaropes were related to an offshoot of Scandinavian phalaropes; more likely, the bird was an offshoot of a North American population.
Conventional wisdom is being re-evaluated, because with the new knowledge, this phalarope may have been going in the right direction all along.
Columnist Sharon Wootton can be reached at 360-468-3964 or www.songandword.com.
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