BRDL 16-17

  2/8/22 - MALL - Mallard

Everyone knows this bird. It's found worldwide. It's in Make Way for Ducklings. It makes for a challenging BRDL. This is a bird that made me appreciate just how hard it is to try and bring young birds into the world. I'm sure it's true for others as well -- but once the mother mallard lays her eggs and starts incubating, the male mallard takes off to hang out somewhere else, and the mother sits on the eggs for a month, barely leaving the nest. And when she does, the eggs are at high risk of being eaten. Infant mortality for mallards is high - there are a lot of predators out there. But somehow they keep on going. 

The photo below is from the UMass Campus Pond -- the bird on the left is a Mallard/American Black Duck hybrid. Apparently mallards have hybridized with a number of other duck species, potentially endangering the black duck gene population, but we'll get to that if BRDL ever has an ABDU.

2/9/22 - SNKI - Snail Kite

Cool specialized bird. It's pretty common in South America, but the only population in the US can be found in the marshes of the Everglades. The snail kite has pretty much one food source -- apple snails. When the marshes of Florida get overdeveloped, or polluted, the snail population decreases and the kite population is affected. 

Fun fact -- apparently the Limpkin (totally different large wading bird found in the same area as the snail kite) also depends on the apple snail, but they don't really compete because the Limpkin pokes around in the reeds, whereas the Snail Kite flies around and gets the snails that are in open water.

Additional interesting fact -- both male and female will stick around until the young are about to fledge, and then one bird leaves while the other raises the young. And then sometimes the bird that leaves goes on to find another mate and have another brood that year. And sometimes it's the male that leaves, and sometimes it's the female -- it's about equal. Which is really interesting when you read about what the mallards do. 

By Andreas Trepte - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42840456