Solace Day 4 Drake Mallard

The girls needed to leave in the late afternoon they had such trivial things as work coming up that they needed to be home for.  So last night we had moored fairly close to Great Haywood.  On the final section we made time to stop at Wolseley Bridge to have a walk to the Staffordshire Wildlife Trust reserve.  Being faster movers than us the girls went off to visit the further away parts of the reserve.  Clickychick and I had a more sedate wander hoping for Kingfishers.  Sadly their nest hole had been washed away over winter and they hadn't nested on the reserve.

Being August there wasn't much exciting among the water fowl.  To the casual observer there seemed to be hundreds of female Mallard.  In reality half (or more) would be male.  Mallard males, in common with some other species go into eclipse after the breeding season.  This is a complete change of plumage into basically female colours /patterns.  Also they are for a few weeks unable to fly.

I chose the blip because this is a drake coming out of eclipse rather early.  The yellow beak shows he is a drake the females at this time of year have blackish beaks.  The crown and eye stripe are darker on males at this time of year.  Of course the main indicator in this specimen is that it isn't the overall brown colour of the females.