(Anas crecca)
Vancouver Island has a large population of migrating Green Green Winged Teal that arrive in the spring. The extreme south coast has a few of them that stay year-round.
The green-winged teal is a small dabbling duck with a green wing patch. Males are mostly gray, with a vertical white bar in front of each wing, and have a reddish head with a broad green patch behind each eye. Males in non-breeding plumage and immature young resemble females. Females are mostly brown, with a buff stripe on each side of the tail. Small bill and pale under tail coverts.
Green-winged teal can be found around rivers, marshes, and coastal estuaries. The Green-Wing Teal’s diet is quite varied, they will feed on insects and aquatic vegetation. An opportunistic feeder, the Green-winged adjusts its diet as different foods becom
e available. Foliage is eaten mostly in the fall and winter, consisting mainly of seeds of grasses, sedges and shoots of water plants.
They will occasionally feed on crops after the fields have been harvested. During the breeding season, they feed on various animal matter like insects, larvae, and fish eggs. A dabbler, the Green-Winged Teal will feed by tipping its body to let it pick at the bottom or gather insects by skimming the water with its bill. The green-winged will also feed along mudflats, foraging for insects and mollusks.
When nesting, the female will use her feet to excavate a depression in the ground where she will begin to lay her eggs, she will cover each egg with vegetation until her last egg is laid, she then cover the nest with down, and will only then start incubating the eggs, this is so that all the birds hatch at the same time.