A few birds from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.
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Green-winged Teal:Green-winged Teal Tengesqaaraq Don’t shoot yet! This little duck doesn’t have much meat on him, and he’s only a pocket duck, something you could stuff in your coat pocket. So, unless you’re really hungry, take a pass and just appreciate it for its beautiful colors and interesting behavior, especially in spring during the mating game. Take a careful look at one of its Yup’ik names, Tengesqaaraq, used by Scammon Bay, Hooper Bay and Chevak people. Think of why it might have this name. Maybe because of its wonderful flying abilities. If you’ve ever flushed him in a pond or on a river, he is like a missile out of water, a bullet through the air, and an impossible target to hit once airborne. The green-winged teal is our smallest dabbling (or “puddle”) duck, and one of our most numerous. It is also one of the earliest migrants in spring and shows up on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in early May, sometimes even sooner. When they arrive on their nesting grounds they are usually already paired up and, after only a short period of ritual courtship displays, get right down to the business of mating and laying eggs. In one of their courtship performances, the male pushes his chest up out of the water, arches his head forward and down, then shakes his bill rapidly in the water while giving a whistle similar to a slow cricket chirp. Especially on their wintering grounds there can be intense competition among males for a female, including provocation by the female, possibly to see which male would be the strongest mate. Only the female builds the nest, which is a shallow depression on the ground filled with small twigs, grass, leaves, and lined with down plucked from her brood patch. It is near water and well hidden by small willows and grass that often form a canopy over it. She lays 6-11, sometimes many more, cream to olive-buff colored eggs, and incubates them alone for about three weeks. During the egg-laying period the male will guard the female and nest, but as incubation begins he leaves for other parts and does not participate in any child rearing. When the mother bird leaves the nest to eat she covers the eggs with her down to conceal them and keep them warm. The young all hatch at about the same time and leave the nest together only hours after hatching. Their mother guards the ducklings, who might return to the nest for a few nights after they hatch. The ducklings have to find all their own food, and they must do a good job of it because they have the fastest growth rate of all North American ducks, fledging about 35 days after hatching. Like their mother, they dabble for food – wading or swimming in shallow water, filtering mud with their bills, picking edible items such as grass and sedge seeds from the surface, and when they’re a little older, upending and feeding on the aquatic roots of bottom plants such as pondweed. They also take aquatic insects, crustaceans, mollusks, tadpoles, fish eggs, and even the rotting remains of dead spawned-out salmon lying in creeks and rivers in late summer. After breeding, the male goes into hiding where he sheds his feathers in what is called a “post-nuptial” or “eclipse” molt. At that time his breeding feathers are replaced by drabber ones like those of the female to make him less conspicuous to predators. He will molt again in time to migrate south in fall. By then he will be back in prime color and ready to begin courting in his winter habitat. Females molt after their young have fledged. I know of two other Yup’ik names for the green-winged teal: Cikiutnaar(aq), used in the Yukon River area; and Kemek’ungiaraq, used in the Norton Sound and Kuskokwim areas. If I were to make an intelligent guess, Cikiutnaar(aq) refers to the gift of food that the duck provides the Yup’ik people, especially in spring. Probably Kemek’ungiaraq does the same, but specifies the food as kemek, or meat. Finally, its scientific name is now Anas carolinensis (“Carolina duck,” possibly because it was first seen by westerners in the Carolinas during the winter), as distinct from its Eurasian cousin, Anas crecca (“duck that makes a creak-like call”). Some ornithologists, however, still consider these two ducks subspecies.  |
