Redhead Duck
Aythya americana
-Male Redheads are a dapper mixture of cinnamon head, black breast and tail, and neat gray body. Females and immatures are a plain, mostly uniform brown. Redheads have black-tipped, gray bills, and in flight they show gray flight feathers.
-Redheads are so exceptionally gregarious they’re referred to as “rafting ducks.” Sometimes they alight at hunting decoys before the hunters have finished setting them up.
-A Redhead pair first inspects potential nest sites from the air, flying low over marshes in the morning and evening. The female swims into dense vegetation to investigate nest sites while the male waits nearby. Females choose stands of cattails and bulrushes, located over water where they are safer from mammalian predators.
- Redheads eat submerged aquatic plants, including green algae, muskgrass, hardstem bulrush, pondweed, and widgeongrass. Though they’re classified as diving ducks, you may also see them “dabbling” in shallow water by tipping tail-up to reach for submerged vegetation and invertebrates.
-Redheads fly faster than most ducks, with a rapid, shallow wingbeat and a flight pattern that’s more erratic than that of the similar-looking Canvasback.
HERE AT ALAMEDA:
In the wild, you’ll often see these sociable ducks feeding with Canvasbacks, Lesser Scaup, Northern Pintails, American Wigeons, and American Coots. Here at the Alameda Park Zoo, you may see them socializing with our other species of waterfowl.