The prettiest duck of them all

This curious looking bird nests in holes in trees, and logging companies were busy at the sawmills making rood beams for the human population explosion in California and New York State where the summer duck bred in the old native forests.

I find it rather strange that it has not become more widespread in the UK. The WEBS wildfowl report I mentioned last week states that only nine wood ducks were seen in the UK last year. This has to be an undercount.

This however is understandable because WEBS does not necessarily cover small rivers and streams, or every small pond in the land. I have seen them occasionally on the River Rother where I have flushed them from hidden pools as I have walked under the alder trees. So a beautiful summer duck could be hiding away on your farm, or in secret pools in the weald. There used to be a largish colony in Devon over a century ago where they had been introduced, but they died out, probably due to overshooting .

To see them effectively however, all you need is to go to the Arundel wildfowl collection on the Arun meadows, which is where I took this picture. This is a drake: the duck is not so bright. Aix sponsa shown here is very closely related to that other extraordinarily marked duck, the mandarin, Aix galericulata, which lives naturally in Asia, Korea, Formosa, and Eastern China.

The mandarin has also been brought to this country, where it has inevitably escaped from collections and set up home in England and parts of Scotland. The first introductions of thw mandarin were in 1745. They also breed in hollow trees, especially oaks. In Windsor Great Park they preferred the nesting boxes put up for them however. This too is a very shy bird and does not like humans near its secret haunts, despite nesting in parks.

Both species are very agile on the wing and remind me of very fit wigeon, climbing rapidly up through the trees and flying high out of sight very quickly. But like snipe, they will often circle and come back near to their original hiding place, and suddenly plummet down to a pond or river-pool a quarter of a mile from where they were flushed.

Wood duck start laying eggs in March, before the mandarin, and so the lazy mandarin mum will often dump her own eggs in the nests of wood duck, and get them to do all the hard work of rearing the family.

Richard Williamson