Wetlands: Homes and Rest Stops for Migrating Birds

Bottoms up! Duck bottoms that is. The tails of dabbling or puddle ducks often stick straight up out of the water, because there ducks feed near the surface of shallow wetland waters. These ducks have special strainers on the edges of their bills to filter out the food from the mud and water. The best known dabbling duck is the mallard.

The male mallard or drake is very colorful. He has a green head, white collar around his neck, brown breast, and grey body. The female mallard or hen, is more drab. Her straw-brown color helps to camouflage her on her nest of dried grasses and other plant matrial.

Mallards are migratory ducks. Instead of living in one place year round, they have winter home and a summer home. They can be seen flying (migrating) in large flocks from one home to the other during the spring and fall. Many mallards spend their winters in the southern United States and their summers in the prairie pothole area of the northern United States and southern Canada. The prairie pothole area is the mallerds' favorite summer nesting spot because of the many small wetlands.

Mallards migrate along the same route each year. The duck highways used by mallards and other waterfowl are called flyways.

Many other duck species use prairie potholes both for nesting and for rest stops during migration. They include blue-winged teal, pintails, shovelers, wigeon, redheads, canvasbacks, scaup, and others. Check your bird book--and your local wetland--to see how many you have.

The Piping Plover

Only the sharpest eyes will see the piping plover's nest. Called a scrape, the nest is a small bowl-shaped hollow in the ground lined with pebbles, bits of shell, or driftwood. This lining helps to camouflage the nest, which is usually built among the scattered stones on the shoreline of a lake or sandy wetland. The eggs are hard to see because they look like pebbles too--small tan eggs with dark speckles.

When the young hatch, they look like little balls of cotton on tiny toothpick legs. They are colored like their parents, whire and sand-colored with black marking. this is the perfect camouflage on the stony beach. The parent birds will move the young away from danger. But if the menace gets too close, the young will drop to the ground and "freeze" to hide.

An adult bird with a "broken wing" is the sign for people and pets to stay away. The wing is not really broken, but is an act by the parents to lure people and animals away from the nest or young birds. It is best to go aroundthe area so you step accidentally on the nest or the young.

This wetlands bird takes great care to hide its nest and protet its young from danger. Even so, the piping plover is an endangered species--animals that become extinct (be gone forever) if something is not done to save them. Piping plovers are endangered because:

• many of the wetlands that they need to livew have been drained for building or farming; and
  
• many careless people (and their pets) destroy the plover's nests along the beaches.