WATERFOWL : animal STORIES :

Many of us have seen waterfowl flying in a ‘V’ formation like a squadron of airplanes. As they fly, they “talk” to each other by honking, quacking, and making other noises. This helps to keep the members of the flock together even in dense clouds or at night.

As these birds migrate, some scientists think that waterfowl use the earth’s magnetic field to help them find their way in the same way that people use compasses. Others think they navigate by using the positions of the sun by day and the stars by night.

Bills to hunt :

The bills of mergansers are long and thin with tooth-like serrations along the edges. The serrations are good for mergansers and other sea ducks for diving for prey, usually keeping themselves to depths of 10 or 20 feet. Dabbling ducks use the serrations on their bills to sift tiny bits of food out of the water.

Favourite food :

Geese like to eat grass and other plants, and their bills are ideal for this purpose. The serrations inside the bill are used to cut up the grass before it is swallowed. Swans prefer plants growing underwater, which they rip up or bite off. Dabbling ducks eat almost anything that floats into their mouths-seeds, water weed, tiny organisms, and more. Sea ducks and mergansers prefer small fish, sea urchins, and shellfish.

Ducklings :

Canada geese leave their wintering grounds in the spring and head north. When they arrive, they build nests and lay eggs perfectly timed to hatch when the days are longest and the weather its warmest. Waterfowl chicks hatch with their eyes open and are covered with downy feathers. Within hours, the babies are swimming and diving for their own food. They grow very fast, and by the first snows they are ready for the long voyage south with their parents.

Their home :

The Northern Hemisphere is home to most of the world’s waterfowl, although they live on every continent except Antarctica. They haunt lakes, rivers, sloughs, ponds, swamps, marshes, deltas, and tundra, some species migrating up to 7,000 miles a year with the change of seasons. In North America they make spectacular congregations on the Mississippi delta in spring, and on prairie sloughs in the fall.

Let them be :

There are 100 million waterfowl in North America alone, so their future seems bright at first glance. However, more than half of the ducks hatched in North America come from nests in the Prairie Pothole area, which is slowly being converted to farms. Every year, in fact, more than 200,000 acres of wetlands are destroyed in the US alone. It is important to leave waterfowl enough land for breeding and living if we want their success to continue.