Northern Shoveler
Welcome to this week’s Wildlife of the Week!
This week's Wildlife of the Week is the Northern Shoveler. These ducks are starting to arrive on their annual migration and there are hundreds in White Springs. They will spend the winter on the refuge before heading north to their summer nesting grounds, largely disappearing from the refuge by late February.
They are easy to identify. The male has a bright green head, white chest and rusty sides. The female is mottled brown, with a big gray and orange bill. Both sexes have a blue wing patch obvious in flight, the male also has bright green secondaries. Their most distinguishing feature is their noticeably large shovel-like bill that gives the duck its name.
They often have their heads down feeding in shallow wetlands and flooded fields, busily sweeping their long bills side to side, filtering out aquatic invertebrates and seeds from the water with comblike projections (called lamellae) along the edge of the bill. They feed on seeds and other parts of aquatic plants, such as pondweeds and grasses and will also eat mollusks, insects, tiny crustaceans and sometimes small fish.
Spatula clypeata Northern Shoveler
Males court females on the wintering grounds with turns, dips, wing flaps, and head pumping. Pairs stay together during the breeding season. After breeding, males group together in small bachelor flocks.
Fun Fact: Shovelers have a distinctive feeding pattern, swimming rapidly in circles to stir up food by creating a vortex effect. Check out the video. (Video and photos by Tom Ress)