Wild in the City: Mallards whistling in the bay
Late fall features the intricate courtship rituals of the mallard
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On a recent walk down by the bay — Ashbridge’s, that is — a strange whistle caught my attention. It was coming from the lake.
Peering through the tangle of shrubby willows and overgrown sumacs at the shoreline, I observed a flotilla of mallard ducks only a few metres out. There was a rather even mix of easily identifiable males — they’re the ones with the bright, iridescent green heads — and dullish brown females.
The females were making the familiar quack, quack, quack vocalizations we associate (wrongly) with all ducks. But the males, instead of their usual nasally rhaeb, rhaeb, rhaeb calls, had changed their tune. They were making a high-pitched whistling sound, as if they were blowing on a squeaky piccolo.
The birds were engaged in an elaborate courtship display typical of their species. In the fall, as early as September, mallards begin their courtship behaviours, performing a series of highly predictable visual and auditory signals that eventually results in mate selection.
I watched, fascinated, as the huge group of lively ducks did what looked like an intricate dance, one characterized by instinct-driven choreography eons old.
As my eyes became accustomed to the patterns playing out before me, I noticed there were two distinct types of behaviours going on: group displays and pair displays.
In the group display, the males, or drakes, appeared to be showing off, as if they were demonstrating their own special fitness and beauty as potential mates to the hens milling about on the water.
In a staccato series of body movements, the drakes raised their bodies up and out of the water with their glossy heads tilted back, flinging a few drops of water into the air as they did. As they reached the peak of the arch formed by their bodies, they emitted a short, shrill whistle — a completely unexpected sound to come from so familiar a duck.
I had to attend closely to see these behaviours at all, as each male’s body-arch-and-whistle manoeuvre was over in less than a second.
While some of the drakes continued their comical whistle display, a few males and females were beginning to show signs of accepting each other as mates — chasing each other for short distances, occasionally stopping to lift a wing and show off the patch of indigo feathers, the speculum, on their wings.
In an odd but easy to see pair-bonding display, I observed as a male and female lowered their head and neck to just above the waterline and swam rapidly forward for a distance of about a metre. The strangeness of this manoeuvre made me laugh out loud.
Another pair of ducks were signalling their readiness to mate. As the male and female faced each other, they pumped their necks up and down in perfect synchrony. When the speed and intensity of this display reached its maximum, the birds mated, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it underwater encounter.
Back at home, I picked up my copy of best-selling American writer Donald Stokes’s Guide to Bird Behavior: Volume 1, which covers the secret lives of the mallard duck, and was able to make sense of the strange goings-on I had seen at the bay.
In a scientific journal article I found online, I read that the late fall matings of mallard ducks are social rather than reproductive — no sperm is transferred from the drake to the hen. The reproductive systems of both sexes are not fully functional in the autumn; their sexual organs will develop in time for the spring breeding season.
Right now, spring seems like a long way off. In the meantime, if you’re down by the bay, or even a tiny stream, and you see a bird that looks like a duck, walks like a duck and swims like a duck — but whistles — you can be pretty sure that bird is a male mallard with mating on its mind.
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