Fulvous whistling duck
The fulvous whistling duck breeds across the world’s tropical regions. It has plumage that is mainly reddish brown, long legs and a long grey bill. It shows a distinctive white band across its black tail in flight. Its preferred habitat consists of wetlands with plentiful vegetation.
About Fulvous whistling duck in brief
The fulvous whistling duck breeds across the world’s tropical regions. It has plumage that is mainly reddish brown, long legs and a long grey bill. It shows a distinctive white band across its black tail in flight. Its preferred habitat consists of wetlands with plentiful vegetation. It feeds in wetlands by day or night on seeds and other parts of plants. It is sometimes regarded as a pest of rice cultivation, and is also shot for food in parts of its range. Despite hunting, poisoning by pesticides and natural predation by mammals, birds, and reptiles, the large numbers and huge range of this duck mean that it is classified as least concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The whistling ducks, Dendrocygna, are a distinctive group of eight bird species within the duck, goose and swan family, Anatidae. They were an early split from the main duck lineage, and were predominant in the Late Miocene before the subsequent radiation of more modern forms in the Pliocene and later. The duck was first described by Johann Friedrich Gmelin in 1789 and given the name Anas fulva but the name was “preoccupied,” or already used, by Friedrich Christian Meuschen in 1787 for another species. This led to the next available name proposed by French ornithologist Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot in 1816 from a Paraguayan specimen as Anas bicolor.
The species has no recognised subspecies, although the birds in northern Mexico and the southern US have in the past been assigned to D. b. helva, described as having paler and brighter underparts and a lighter crown than D. b. bicolors. The birds are noisy birds with a clear kee-wee call on the ground or in flight, frequently heard at night. They are moulted every year; each feather is replaced once annually. There is a complete moult after moulting, and birds then seek the cover of dense wetland vegetation while they are flightless. The breeding adults, which pair for life, take turns to incubate, and the eggs hatch in 24–29 days. The downy grey ducklings leave the nest within a day or so of hatching, but the parents continue to protect them until they fledge around nine weeks later. All plumages are fairly similar but the female is slightly smaller-plumaged and duller, especially on the flanks. The male has paler underparts, and a dark brown to black stripe runs through the center of the crown down the back of the neck to the base of the mantle. The mantle is more darker shade of brown with buff-tipped feathers, the flight feathers and tail are dark brown. The wingspan ranges from 85 to 93 cm and the wings are brown, with no white crescent rump.
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This page is based on the article Fulvous whistling duck published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 30, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
