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Wood Duck | Aix sponsa
Carolina-eend | Pato huyuyo
The Wood Duck is a medium-sized duck of wooded waters, the male with a glossy green and purple head lined with white. Cuba holds a small resident breeding population; elsewhere the species is a scarce winter visitor or vagrant from North America. In Cuba it is called pato huyuyo.
Voice
The female gives a loud rising oo-eek, especially when flushed and in flight; the male a thin whistled jeeeb.
Recording: Don Profota — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
47–54 cm, with a crest hanging down the nape, a fairly long broad tail and a short bill. The male has a glossy green and purple head with two narrow white lines running back into the crest, a white throat with a white spur onto the cheek and neck, red eyes and a red-and-white bill. The breast is chestnut with white spots, separated from the buff flanks by a white and a black bar. The female is grey-brown with a grey head, a white teardrop-shaped patch around the eye and a white throat; the flanks are speckled. In eclipse the male resembles the female but keeps the red-and-white bill and the white throat pattern. In flight the long tail, large head and dark, blue-glossed wings with a white trailing edge are distinctive.
Confusion species
Neither the male nor the female resembles any other duck in the region; in the female the white eye patch and the crest are distinctive. Females of Blue-winged Teal Spatula discors and White-cheeked Pintail Anas bahamensis lack the eye patch and crest; Blue-winged Teal has a pale blue forewing, White-cheeked Pintail white cheeks and a red bill base.
Habitat
Wooded fresh water: swamp forest, flooded forest, wooded banks of rivers, lakes and reservoirs, and marshes with trees nearby. It eats seeds, fruit, acorns and water plants, as well as invertebrates. The nest is in a tree hole, sometimes high above the ground.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation types of the Caribbean.
Range and movements
In Cuba all year, with a small breeding population joined in winter by birds from North America. Elsewhere a scarce winter visitor or vagrant, mainly in the north of the region, including the Bahamas; in Puerto Rico the species is regarded as accidental. Outside the region it breeds in southern Canada and much of the United States and winters in the southern United States and northern Mexico.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
In Cuba best at wooded swamps and rivers, where the birds often sit among overhanging vegetation along the bank and fly off with the female's loud call when disturbed. At dusk they fly to their roosts.
Conservation status
Not threatened globally. In North America the species had declined steeply by about 1900 through hunting and forest loss, and has since recovered. The small Cuban population depends on swamp forest with old trees and is vulnerable to its felling and to hunting.
Scientific name
Aix sponsa | (Linnaeus, 1758)
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Anas Sponsa; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Aix was introduced in 1828 by Boie. Aix is the Ancient Greek word for a diving bird mentioned by Aristotle that can no longer be identified. sponsa is Latin for 'bride', after the drake's splendid, wedding-dress-like plumage. The specimen the first description was based on came from Carolina, United States.