Two very rare Mandarin ducks
Jan 11, 2021 22:58:25 #
There is a pocket of Mandarin ducks in N.C. and a small pocket in northern Ca. But that is about it in the U.S. How these two got to Indiana is anyone's guess.
Jan 11, 2021 23:31:57 #
Jan 11, 2021 23:34:50 #
sudamar wrote:
There is a pocket of Mandarin ducks in N.C. and a small pocket in northern Ca. But that is about it in the U.S. How these two got to Indiana is anyone's guess.
Cute little things.
I have seen pictures of some here in So Calif on a birder's site.
There are colonies all over as they have been popular as pets off and on. Europe, UK, Ireland all have them. While in their native range of Eastern Asia and Japan they are getting hard to find as farming and city growth have destroyed their woodland homes. They and the Wood Duck are the only two members of their genus. Both have similar habitat and life styles and ducklings or young ones can be hard to tell apart.
That white one - apparently sometime somewhere a mutation produced white ones, no one knows where or when and especially the pet industry now breeds white pairs to get more. No, they are not albinos, they are white feathered but otherwise normal. Then some of those escape from people's parks and gardens and you now sometimes find white or mixed white & wild colors in the wild.
Jan 11, 2021 23:45:39 #
....you really know your ducks. I have a pix of a wood duck with these two. The three of them hung out all winter on a small city lake here a couple years ago. Haven't seen them since. I often wonder where they went.
Jan 11, 2021 23:54:18 #
Jan 12, 2021 00:01:45 #
sudamar wrote:
....you really know your ducks. I have a pix of a wood duck with these two. The three of them hung out all winter on a small city lake here a couple years ago. Haven't seen them since. I often wonder where they went.
Ah, I am a jack of all knowledge, master of few. But thanks to the coming of the internet several years before I retired from teaching history, geography and government plus my habit of constantly changing and "upgrading" my lesson plans I learned to be a decent on line researcher. Being at a Federally designated and funded "Digital High School" my last 13 years with computers in every room, fiber optics and highspeed internet + every professional search site known to educational types I got a good start on learning on line research.
When I saw the white one it kicked in my "Go and find out!" gene.
Jan 12, 2021 00:13:14 #
Here are two of the sites I looked at:
https://ebird.org/species/manduc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_duck
https://ebird.org/species/manduc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_duck
Jan 12, 2021 00:40:06 #
Thanks...very interesting. I don't think there is a more beautiful duck in the world, with the exception of maybe the wood duck, which is related to the Mandarin duck.
Jan 12, 2021 05:30:53 #
sudamar wrote:
There is a pocket of Mandarin ducks in N.C. and a small pocket in northern Ca. But that is about it in the U.S. How these two got to Indiana is anyone's guess.
Beautiful
Jan 12, 2021 07:43:20 #
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Jan 12, 2021 09:46:37 #
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