How to Identify Ducks & Geese by Sight

Video Transcript

"Hello! Welcome to Expert Village. My name is Wayne Peterson and I'm the director of the Important Bird Areas Program for the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Today we're here at the Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary in Marshfield, Massachusetts where we'll be talking about bird identification and some of the equipment and essential tools that are useful to get one started in this incredibly interesting pastime. One of the groups of birds that are fairly easy to regularly pick out and recognize as part of a group are the waterfowl. By this, I mean birds like swans, geese, and ducks of various species. These are birds that typically are found either swimming in the water or in some cases, like the Canada geese behind me here, they'll regularly come out of the water and graze on land. But in all cases, they're characterized by having predominantly webbed feet as we saw in our little stuffed bufflehead earlier in the segment. Also, they typically feature, at least in the males, predominant color and patterns at certain times of the year that can be very useful to recognizing them. Both when they're swimming in the water or when they're in flight. In which case, the pattern is almost as important as the color. And the location of dark and light areas on the head and on the body are also very critical to their ID. In flight, the wing pattern of many waterfowl is quite distinctive. Lot of the ducks have a colored iridescent patch on the trailing edge of the wing called the speculum. In some cases, this is blue or violent or green. Sometimes there are white little markings that border the speculum area. In some other species, there may be patches on the lead edge of the wing that are very distinctive. Some ducks like scads have a wing stripe that runs out the length of the wing. These would all be the sorts of features that for ducks as they take off or are seen in flight can be very useful. On the water, then we can look for other patterns. For example, the mallard duck has a dark green head with a very prominent white ring around the neck. In the case of the Canada geese behind me, it looks like somebody has pulled a black stocking over their neck and then given them a white chin strap. A very distinctive combination of features that radiately distinguishes Canada geese. In some of the other waterfowl, it's important to recognize that the males and females look different. In geese, for example, and in swans, the males and females are essentially the same, but in many duck species the females are often times considerably less distinctive. Typically, being more brown and modeled in their plumage. So in some cases, you can determine the sex of a particular female duck by the company that she's keeping, because often times you'll see pairs of ducks together and you can sort of deduce that the female is the brown individual with the more brightly colored male. "