Common, Widespread, Successful… Australian Wood Ducks

By Keith Hutton on March 22, 2013 in Other

Australian Wood Ducks are common and widespread in suitable habitat, which includes city parks and golf courses, but they are not abundant in the Sydney region. Everybody is familiar with ducks and geese, and Australian Wood Ducks show characteristics of both. They have very small goose-like bills, long legs and long necks, walk confidently with an upright stance and graze on pastures like geese do. Nevertheless, the experts have decided they are ducks, a decision based on DNA analyses. They also have long dark plumes on the head and neck that resemble a mane. As a consequence of these characteristics they have had several names in the past including Maned Duck, Maned Goose and Wood Duck. They are native Australian birds and Wood Duck has always been the most widely used name for them, so it seems reasonable that Australian Wood Duck has now been adopted as the preferred name to differentiate them from wood ducks that are found outside Australia.

Australian Wood Ducks are usually seen in pairs or small groups in lightly timbered areas near water with short grass and herbage nearby, where they often perch in trees. They are handsome birds with dark heads and necks and two black stripes along the back.

Males appear silver-grey with speckled breasts, whereas females are browner, show a paler brown head, more extensive speckling and whitish lines above and below the eyes; immature birds resemble females. Flight is fast and very manoeuvrable but the wing beats are slow compared to those of other ducks. White trailing panels are conspicuous in the dark-tipped wings of flying birds.

Australian Wood Ducks occur throughout Australia including Tasmania, with vagrants occasionally recorded in New Zealand. They are generally widespread and common in most of the east and southwest, abundant in the Murray Darling basin, less common near the coast and erratic wanderers in the arid interior. Stock dams, lagoon margins, swamps and suitable urban parklands are all acceptable habitats. Rain stimulates breeding, usually in spring, and as feeding areas dry in summer, families congregate together and move to wetter areas to source fresh grazing.

Adults eat grass, clover and other fresh green herbage supplemented with grain and insects, and most of their food intake is obtained from grazing pasture and young cereal crops. Initially ducklings eat insects that have been disturbed by parent birds feeding, then increase grazing until six weeks of age when they are largely feeding like adults.

Australian Wood Ducks have benefitted from European settlement and adapted well to development of pastoral enterprises and cereal cropping, despite organised shooting for crop protection and sport. They were among the top forty birds recorded in Australia in the most recent atlas survey, and also in the top ten reported breeders. They continued to increase nationally over the last twenty years of the last century and appear to be of least conservation concern, even though significant regional variations were noticed, which probably related to rainfall.