Spatula hottentota
A shy bird that is easily overlooked, the Blue-billed Teal inhabits permanent freshwater wetlands with densely vegetated banks and lush emergent vegetation like rushes and reeds. They’re omnivores and their diet includes a wide variety of aquatic plants and invertebrates and occasionally even frogs. Blue-billed Teals are usually encountered in pairs or small flocks.
Blue-billed Teals breed mainly towards the end of summer and into early autumn. The male plays little to no role in the incubation of the eggs or the rearing of the chicks. It’s the female that constructs the bowl-shaped nest of grass and down on the ground, that incubates the clutch of up to 12 eggs for about 4 weeks and that rears the chicks, which fledge by about 2 months of age. Fully grown they’re about 35m long and weigh approximately 250g, making it one of the smallest duck species in our country.
The Blue-billed Teal is rather uncommon in South Africa, with a limited distribution and populations concentrated in Gauteng and adjacent parts of the Free State and Mpumalanga, parts of Kwazulu-Natal and coastal pockets in the Eastern and Western Cape. Beyond our borders they’re found in a band across central and eastern Africa as far north as Ethiopia, with further populations in Madagascar and northern Nigeria and neighbouring parts of Niger and Chad. According to the IUCN this species is of least concern.
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