Red-crested pochard

Voice

Quiet compared with dabbling ducks. In display the male gives a rasping, sneezing betz or tchep, the female a low rolling kerr-kerr. Heard mainly in March and April, when several males chase a single female across open water.

Identification

The male has a rusty orange bouffant head, a bright red bill, black breast and underparts and white flanks that flash as a long white band in flight. The female is brown with a dark cap and a strikingly pale cheek and throat, and a grey bill with a pink tip. Both show a white wing bar running the whole length of the wing.

Confusion species

Females suggest female Common Scoter and Pochard. Red-crested is bigger and longer-bodied, with a cleanly cut pale cheek against the dark cap rather than the streaked head of a Scoter. The long white wing bar rules out Pochard at once.

Habitat

Large, shallow fresh and brackish waters rich in stoneworts and pondweed: peat lakes, gravel pits, lagoons, rice fields and delta lakes. Nests in dense bankside cover and on reed islets. Feeds by diving and by dabbling, and often grazes floating plants from the surface.

Range and movements

Centred on southern and eastern Europe and Central Asia, with a stronghold in Spain: the Ebro delta, the Albufera of Valencia, the La Mancha lagoons and Doñana. The Netherlands lies at the north-west edge of the range, with breeding in the Delta, the border lakes and the South Holland lakes.

• Resident
• Breeding (summer)
• Winter
• Passage
• Migration direction
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

Look on large clear lakes such as the Veerse Meer or the Nieuwkoopse Plassen in April and May, in the quiet hours just after dawn. Scan for orange globes standing out among Pochard; the male's high round head shows at long range.

Conservation status

In Europe the species is slowly increasing and spreading north-west, including in the Netherlands. In Spain the main concerns are lead shot, loss of submerged plants through turbidity and the drying out of lagoons. Escaped collection birds locally blur the assessment of genuinely wild breeding.