A Cast of Thousands…by Brad Marks

Hoping those here in the States had a happy and safe 4th of July celebration! Our Intrigued HQ is just down the road from an individual that puts on a rather impressive annual show for us ruralites. Had some of our staff over (including Brad and Jan), filled the coolers with drinks, threw some meat on the grill and capped the night with things that light up the sky and make you go Oooohhhh and Ahhhhh – life is good. I did manage to come out with a losing record in our highly competitive JARTS tournament (the real ones, not those pansy ones they try to pawn off on kids these days). That will have to be remedied during our next Intrigued outing!!! As promised in my previous post, Brad has posting duties while I taper/rest/heal/plan/worry/obsess/fret and generally drive Linda crazy this week leading up to the first ultra of the year. One of those planning tasks is to set the crew schedule. In this case, only a cast of one (well, and 3 furry assistants), but I can tell you without hesitation, Linda is the secret sauce to success. While I go through the details with her, we’ll have Brad bring us an adventure with a much larger crew!

Take it away Brad…

After a very long and productive day of birding at Harris Neck NWR in Georgia, Jan and I decided we needed just a little bit more birding in our full day.  Our memory cards weren’t quite full, and what’s the use of having large memory cards if you don’t fill them?  Plus, we had plenty of battery life left on our cameras.

We decided to visit the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge, which sits on the South Carolina state line shared with Georgia.  While on a bird walk on Hilton Head at the Audubon Newhall Preserve, we heard people talking about the “millions” of ducks at Savannah.  Others on the walk said there can’t be more than 10-20 birds there, there has never been a “million” in one location.  A million ducks would be interesting.  That sounded like a challenge for us.

Savannah NWR, at least the part we visited, is a drive-through nature preserve.  The gravel drive is mostly a causeway type of thoroughfare, raised a few feet above the tidal water on either side.  We had just entered the preserve and rounded the first corner when we saw a large grey pickup parked along the side of the road.  That usually means there’s something worth photographing nearby.  I pulled within a respectable distance of the truck and parked the car.  Jan and I already had our cameras assembled and ready to go from earlier in the day.  We saw the owner of the truck on the other side of the road on a smaller walking path.  He was looking into the distance. 

As we approached the driver was shaking his head and muttering something about, “every time I move, they move.”  He had just driven non-stop from Virginia and was a bit worn out chasing ducks back and forth across this little pond.

What’s that sound, everybody look what’s going down on the other side of the jump!

We quickly found out what he was talking about.  Thousands (not much of an exaggeration) of Black-bellied Whistling-Ducks (Dendrocygna autumnalis) lifted out of the water and off the grassy areas to fly away.  OK, maybe not thousands, but I could easily count several hundred of them in the water and on land.  It hardly seemed worth the flight because they only traveled about 50 yards to the other side of the water.  Oh, and this duck was a +1 for us.

The other driver mentioned he had seen this all afternoon and to stay put for a minute, so we did.  He drove around to the other side and as he approached the ducks, they flew back to where we were.  I didn’t notice during their first one or two trips across the water, but there was a constant noise coming from the ducks.  Sort of a . . . what’s the word I’m looking for . . . whistling.  It reminded me of when a Canada goose flies by you can hear a constant wheeze from flapping their wings.  But this was truly similar to whistling.  I was thinking Roger Whittaker for a while, but couldn’t come up with the tune to match.  Kids, go ask your grandparents about Roger Whittaker.

Sure enough, the rest of the cloud of ducks flew back toward us, banked sharply and landed near the water facing where they had just flown from.  The very few ducks in this photo represents a very small slice of the ground that was covered with ducks.

These must have ADHD (Acute Duck Hyperactivity Disorder) because the ducks had no sooner landed when they took off again.  Instead of fighting them, we joined them and drove to the other side of the pond they seemed to like so much.

As with most groups, there are outliers, those that don’t like to conform.  As soon as the group had flown the other direction (I lost track of how many times by then), one decides to be different.

Instead of landing, this one circled back to right where it started.  Does it know about the Black Skimmers we saw at Fish Haul Beach on Hilton Head Island? (Stay tuned, more on that encounter coming soon!)

The Black-Bellied Whistling-Duck range is mostly South America with extremely narrow bands along the coasts, and just into South Carolina.  We saw them near the northern edge of their range.  Range maps don’t show them traveling much further north along the Atlantic Coast, but spotting maps show them over most of the eastern half of the United States from time to time.  With the amount of alligators Jan and I saw in South Carolina, (story here) I was surprised not to see one with duck feathers sticking out of its mouth.  Maybe that’s why the ducks keep flying from one side of the pond to the other. 

We found Whistling-Ducks in one of their preferred habitats:  shallow ponds with lots of plant life growing in the water.  Whistling-Ducks eat mainly aquatic plants, and the occasional crop from a farmer’s field.  Now and then, they will snack on snails or insects.  They typically forage at night.

As much as they like the water, Whistling-Ducks mainly nest in trees, with an occasional nest on the ground.  A pair will raise 9-18 eggs, one or two times per year.  Incubation takes up to 30 days and the nestlings take off after a couple of weeks.  Ducklings are born nearly independent.

Black-bellied Whistling-Ducks have long legs and spend most of their time walking on land or perching in trees.  They are also very social, often forming flocks of up to 1,000 individuals, which is nearly precisely what we witnessed.

After watching this constant ballet of flying back and forth, and back and forth, we realized we had only gone a half of a mile into the 4-mile route.  And the sun was dropping.  Time to continue on the drive to see what we can see.

Thank you for reading.  If you want to see more Black-bellied Whistling-Duck photos, please visit here.

Credits:

Thanks again to Jan and Allyson (with Associate editor Elfie below) for proofreading and editing.  Thanks to Jan for some of the photos in this article.