There is a semi-old adage that says if something walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. It was derived from a poem by James Whitcomb Riley, who died in 1916. But the notion, called the Duck Test, reached its heyday in the 1950s when it became a way to smear someone as a communist without having any actual proof.
The phrase came to mind the other day while I was walking along the edge of the moat at Fort Zachary Taylor State Park, and heard what could only be described as wussy little flute-y sounds coming from multiple places in the mangroves. It took me a while to remember what they were – a blue-winged teal.
If a bird looks like a duck, swims like a duck, but does not quack like a duck, is it still a duck?
We, as a species, have learned lately that the various languages of birds are far more nuanced and communicative than we have given them credit for. While we hear what we think are two identical notes, they could be hearing two vastly different things with two vastly different meanings, such as “Hey, I’m over here,” and “Careful, there’s an eagle circling up there.”
Not to be vain, but I assumed all the duck chatter was about me. Blue-winged teal are hunted pretty heavily, and even in a place like the Keys, where it would be illegal to hunt them, they are justifiably wary of people.
I could see the ducks through the mangroves, but I couldn’t get a shot of any of them without a lot of leafy green in the periphery, giving the images, when I chimped them on the back of the camera, a certain sense of furtiveness. So I walked until I found a low spot in the mangroves and waited. Eventually a quintet of them – three males and two females – swam into view.
They didn’t seem to mind me until I lifted my binoculars, then they all did neat little pivots, the webbed footwork that propelled them and changed their direction hidden beneath the water. When I raised my camera, which to them might have looked like lifting a gun, they flew 20 or 30 yards out of frame and landed.
The name duck actually comes from the verb duck, as in to duck or dive. The name teal means to reproduce or have a brood. The color teal is named after the green-winged teal, a species in which the males have a bold green comma on each side of their face, and both males and females have similarly hued patches on the trailing edges of their wings, which is most apparent in flight.
Blue-winged teal are closely related to the green-winged. They too have green patches on the trailing edges of their wings, but they also have much bigger powder-blue patches on the leading edges of their wings, which are dramatic when they fly. Hence their common name.
The blue-winged teal’s Latin name is Spatula discors. Spatula means “spoon shaped” and probably derives from their cousin species, the northern shoveler, which has a shovel-shaped bill, with spoons and shovels both being concave tools. Discors means conflict. According to “The Dictionary of Birds of the United States,” the idea of conflict is “thought to be a reference to the call, but disagreement exists on this derivation because the call of this teal is not loud or unpleasant.” (No doubt “not loud or unpleasant” is just a polite way of saying “wussy.”)
The dictionary suggests that the idea of a conflicted sounding noise may derive from the sounds a blue-winged teal makes when it takes off. Blue-winged teal are dabbling ducks, though, which means they have proportionally smaller feet than diving ducks, meaning dabbling ducks can simply leap into the air from the surface of the water to take flight, where diving ducks have to leap up and then run across the surface of the water to take flight. On the scale of duck-taking-off noises, dabbling ducks, like blue-winged teals, tend to be on the quieter end.
Then again, the Latin name for the species, which only breeds in North America, was given by the famed taxonomist Carl Linnaeus in 1766, who described it from a dead specimen, so he probably didn’t know much about how they moved or sounded.
And that’s probably enough about names that were given a quarter of a millennium ago in a foreign language. Though I should point out that Marc Catesby, an elder of Carl Linnaeus who actually saw the species alive in the future United States, called the species the white-faced teal, which to my mind is a stronger name.
Male blue-winged teals, also known as drakes, have a dramatic white crescent, like a South Carolina moon, on each side of their black head. It’s a field mark you can see both when the bird is in flight and when it is not. They also have these beautiful coppery, densely spotted flanks that come off looking almost like leopard print but, you know, classy.
Female blue-winged teals, also known as hens, like the females of most sexually dimorphic species, have more subtle plumage, generally brown and streaky and less attention-drawing. Which makes sense, as they are less expendable than the males, who will defend their nesting territory, but not contribute much other effort to the raising of their offspring.
Back to the Duck Test. I didn’t do it standing on the side of the moat, but when I got home I pulled up the Sibley app on my phone. The first audio recording on there was the male, with the same feeble sounding peeps. The second was called the “male chux” which, if you cocked your head right, could almost sound something like a quack.
But the third recording was of the female, and it sounded like a lower version of the male chux at first, but then rolled into something that sounded like full-on quacking. Thus passing the Duck Test. Though there is still no proof they are communists.
