X-Treme Wigeon
ByLook at enough birds, and you’ll quickly figure out that no two individuals are the same. Even puddle ducks, with their simple, blocky plumages, show plenty of variation from one to the next, some brighter, some duller. Drake American Wigeon are no exception: some have very broad, very extensive green face-stripes, others less so. And a few drakes have startlingly creamy white heads, with very little of the streaking and mottling that makes “normal” wigeon so gray-headed.
I saw two such birds over the long Thanksgiving weekend, one at Willcox and one at Tucson’s Lakeside Park.
The Willcox bird was very striking even at a distance, with a notable yellowish tint to the face and quite extensive green. Sunday’s Tucson bird was a little more freckly, but still obviously different from his companions.
This individual also had a little bit less green on the head than the Willcox bird, creating a bizarre pattern when it rolled and preened.
A quick glance through some of the standard resources doesn’t turn much up about variation in American Wigeon’s head pattern; BNA does illustrate a reasonably pale-headed bird (still a bit more spotted than the Lakeside bird).
How often do you see American Wigeon of this type? Looking for them in big wigeon flocks can be more rewarding than looking for Eurasian Wigeon!
4 Comments
December 2nd, 2009 at 6:10 am
Hi Rick, Nice photos of this variant. During the 1990s when I was living in Tucson, I would check the wigeon flock at Reid Park every winter because it was possible to get very close looks and I was searching for female Eurasian Wigeon. Never found one of those, but most winters during that time there were one or sometimes two male American Wigeon of this pale-headed version within that flock. This could have been the same birds returning, I suppose, because I didn’t see the same type consistently elsewhere (for example, I looked closely through some huge wigeon flocks at parks in Scottsdale without seeing this type).
December 3rd, 2009 at 1:48 pm
What a weird bird Rick. Pretty though!
December 12th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
I’ve been birding for 30 years now but I’d never noticed any American Wigeons like those until today, when my wife and I found one at the Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary near Vancouver, BC. Chances are I wouldn’t have noticed that one, either, except that I had read this blog post a couple of weeks earlier.
December 12th, 2009 at 7:35 pm
That’s great, Paul! Nathan Hentze very kindly sent me the following from a Vancouver Is listserve, 2003:
“This topic seems to come up every fall/winter when the AMWI come back
in numbers…. This trait is common enough that I would tend to think that it occurs at low frequencies throughout the breeding range rather than just being asubpopulation of AMWI. In the Comox Valley I have personally seen a flock of 100 wigeon of which 5 had pale cheeks (though certainly it’s much less common than that usually). Nevertheless it is quite reasonable to expect to see at least one of these variants on any given day that you decide to look through wigeon flocks in the Comox Valley. From talking to California birders it appears to increase in frequency the farther north you go (that is we see it more often here than they do in California). What I don’t know is if they just see less wigeon in general than we do. Has anybody seen this in central or eastern AMWI?
“It would be interesting to learn of the mechanisms responsible for
this occurrence, and if it really is widespread or indeed just found
within a limited subpopulation of AMWI. Also there seems to be a
cline as the trait is not always just present or absent, but I have
seen wigeon with varying amounts of pale in the cheeks. Note though
that a dominant allele can still be expressed less frequently than
recessives under certain circumstances….
“Finally as Guy [Monty] pointed out, for how common these individuals are, the characteristics of them never seem to be illustrated or described anywhere but regional listserves. If any of you are ever in the RBCMuseum check out the waterfowl display and you’ll see one of these birds in the collection.”