Green-winged Teal
Anas crecca
eBird describes the Green-winged Teal like this: Tiny duck with a petite, thin bill. Males have a brown head with a wide green swatch behind the eye, creamy speckled breast, and mostly gray body. Females are brown, darker overall than other dabbling ducks. Forages by dabbling and tipping-up to reach submerged aquatic vegetation. Also regularly walks around mudflats to feed. All About Birds adds this descriptive information about the Green-winged Teal: The little Green-winged Teal is the smallest dabbling duck in North America. The natty male has a cinnamon-colored head with a gleaming green crescent that extends from the eye to the back of the head. In flight, both sexes flash deep-green wing patches (specula). Look for them on shallow ponds and in flooded fields, and listen for the male’s decidedly non-ducklike whistle. These common ducks breed along northern rivers; wintering flocks can number as many as 50,000.
I met my first Green-winged Teal on the morning of January 6, 2021 at Estero Llano Grande State Park in Weslaco, Texas. In fact, it was one of the first birds I saw that morning, in the Ibis Pond near the park Visitor Center. Here are a couple of the photos I took that morning.
“Cool Facts” About The Green-winged Teal From All About Birds…
- The American and Eurasian forms of the Green-winged Teal were formerly considered different species. The Eurasian teal differ from the American by lacking the vertical white shoulder stripe and having a horizontal white stripe along the back instead. Eurasian teal show up casually each year along both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts.
- The Aleutian Islands of Alaska support their own race of Green-winged Teal, Anas crecca nimia. Unlike other Green-winged Teal populations, this race doesn’t migrate. In winter the birds move from summering sites on ponds and lakes to the islands’ beaches, where they forage in tide pools and on shallow-water reefs.
- Green-winged Teals have closely spaced, comblike projections called lamellae around the inner edge of the bill. They use them to filter tiny invertebrates from the water, allowing the birds to capture smaller food items than other dabbling ducks.
- Green-winged Teal sometimes switch wintering sites from year to year. One banding study found that individuals wintering in Texas one year went as far away as California in subsequent years. This lack of philopatry, or “faithfulness” to a particular site, may reflect the tendency of males that did not breed the year before to try to find mates among a different set of wintering females.
- The oldest known Green-winged Teal was at least 20 years and 3 months, based on banding data. It was a female banded in 1941 in Oklahoma, and recovered by a hunter 1960 in Missouri.