Photo courtesy Charles Martinez
This week’s Bird of the Week, compliments of the Weminuche Audubon Society and Audubon Rockies, is the wooden duck.
We don’t get to see wooden geese typically right here, however what a deal with once we do. When one spent a couple of days just lately on the river on the town, attractive, lovely, unimaginable and superior have been adjectives used on ebird stories to explain it. This male on the river handled us to shut views when he frolicked close to the shoreline.
Almost each feather on the male has an intricate sample of colour that’s iridescent in daylight. His boxy-shaped crested head and mane are shiny inexperienced lower with white stripes. Feather colours on his physique present chestnut, purple, browns and shades of blue. Both the intense purple eyes of the male and the white teardrop patch across the eyes of the brownish feminine confer a startled look.
True to their title, wooden geese are at home excessive in bushes close to water. Their webbed toes are tipped in sturdy claws that permit them to grip bark and perch on branches. Their wings and tails are formed for navigation by the woods. These are cavity-nesting geese who can’t hole out a gap and like bushes that are over or near water. Cavities used are sometimes in bushes the place the heartwood is rotted and a gap exists the place a department broke off.
Incubation and elevating of young falls on the feminine. One day after the young have hatched, the mother waits beneath the nest and calls “jump.” Nest cavities could also be very deep and hatchlings use their clawed toes to crawl up the within and perch on the gap earlier than leaping 50 toes or extra to the bottom or water beneath.
Wood geese are omnivores that dabble for aquatic vegetation and seeds, bugs, snails, tadpoles and salamanders. They most frequently inhabit water across the edges of swamps, sluggish streams, beaver ponds or marshes fringed with woods. If aquatic assets are scarce, they forage on the forest ground for nuts, or for grains in fields. Acorns are a favourite meals.
Once headed towards extinction resulting from uncontrolled hardwood deforestation and market looking, wooden geese are actually one of many species that may be a conservation success story resulting from wetland and waterfowl protections.
For info on occasions, go to www.weminucheaudubon.org and www.fb.com/weminucheaudubon/.
