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White-Headed Duck | Oxyura leucocephala
Witkopeend | Malvasía cabeciblanca | Weißkopfruderente | צחראש | Érismature à tête blanche
A squat diving duck with a heavy blue bill, swollen at the base, and a stiff tail often carried cocked. The drake has a white head with nothing but a black cap on it. Of all European ducks, this is the one whose survival hangs most on a single region: Iberia.
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Voice
Effectively silent outside display; a whole day at a lagoon full of them yields nothing. Displaying drakes swing the head, tap the bill against the inflated neck and give a low rolling prrrt that barely carries across water. Disturbed females give a short hoarse kek. April to June is the only time worth listening, and then only at close range.
Recording: Geoffrey Monchaux — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Identification
Small and thickset, with a bull neck, a large head and a pointed tail held at an angle or straight up. The drake has a white head with a black crown that stops above the eye, a narrow black neck ring and a pale blue bill whose base is swollen high with a concave upper edge; the body is warm chestnut with a finely stippled greyish back and rufous undertail coverts. In winter the bill fades to grey-blue but keeps its shape. Females and immatures are dull brown with a dark crown, a pale cheek and a single dark stripe across it; the swollen bill base shows on them too. Sits low, dives almost continuously, and flies rarely, low and fast on a plain dark wing without a speculum.
Confusion species
Everything turns on Ruddy Duck Oxyura jamaicensis. On the drake of that species the black cap runs down below the eye, so the white cheek is a bounded patch rather than a white head; the bill base is far less swollen and the undertail coverts are white, not rufous. Hybrids are the real difficulty and have turned up repeatedly in Iberia: dark smudging running across the cheek, a bill shape between the two, and a greyish cast to head and body. On females it comes down to the cheek stripe, which is narrow, straight and clean-cut on Ruddy Duck but broader and more diffuse on White-Headed Duck, with the bill profile the most reliable character. A female whose bill you cannot see properly is a bird to leave unrecorded.
Habitat
Deep, permanent lagoons and lakes with clear fresh to slightly brackish water and a broad fringe of reed and reedmace. Dives in the open middle for midge larvae, crustaceans and the seeds of aquatic plants, and edges in against the reed during the day. In Iberia it uses man-made waters just as readily: reservoirs, disused saltpans and the settlement lagoons at El Hondo. Shallow pools that dry out in summer are of no use to a bird that needs water it can dive in.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
Two separate populations: a migratory eastern one from the Kazakh steppe and the Caspian region to the Iranian Plateau and the Indus plain, and a largely sedentary western one in Iberia and north-west Africa. Iberia holds the European stronghold; the strongholds today lie within the triangle from Madrid to the mouth of the Guadalquivir and Cabo de la Nao: the lagoons of Córdoba led by Zóñar, the Doñana marismas and the Brazo del Este, the wetlands of La Mancha, Campotéjar and Las Moreras in Murcia, and El Hondo, the Clot de Galvany and the Santa Pola saltpans in Alicante. Outside Iberia and the Maghreb it is a genuine rarity in Europe, and in the north of the continent most records involve birds escaped from collections. Any northern claim is weighed against that background.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
El Hondo near Elche is the best address. Go to the hides on the south side early in the morning and scan the open water immediately in front of the reed. The lagoons at Córdoba and the Clot de Galvany near Alicante are equally reliable. Look for a small dark duck riding low with the tail cocked, staying under for ten to twenty seconds at a time. Check the cheek and bill shape on every bird: the recovery programme runs on reports of odd-looking heads.
Conservation status
Endangered (EN) on the world list. The Iberian population fell to 22 birds on a single lagoon near Córdoba in 1977; once shooting there was stopped and the waters protected, it grew to over two thousand birds across thirteen provinces, with Zóñar and El Hondo as the cores. Drought, aquifer depletion, lead and heavy metals in the sediment, loss of reed fringe and Ruddy Duck remain the pressures. The last goes back to birds that escaped from collections in the British Isles in the 1950s; the feral population there was largely removed between 2005 and 2010, and every Ruddy Duck or hybrid found near Iberian White-Headed Duck waters is removed.
Scientific name
Oxyura leucocephala | (Scopoli, 1769)
Scopoli described the species in 1769 as Anas leucocephala; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Oxyura was introduced in 1828 by Bonaparte. Oxyura is Greek, from oxys 'sharp' and oura 'tail', after the stiff tail feathers the bird can hold upright. leucocephala is Greek, from leukos 'white' and kephalē 'head', for the white head of the male. The specimen the first description was based on came from northern Italy.