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Blue-Billed Teal | Spatula hottentota
Gouden taling | Cerceta Hotentote
The Blue-Billed Teal is the smallest dabbling duck of the region, a warm buff, speckled teal with a dark cap and a blue bill. It often hides among marginal plants and is noticed only when a small party flies off low over the water.
Voice
Mostly silent. The male gives soft clicking and ticking notes, ke-ke-ke, the female a series of soft, high quacks.
Recording: Andrew Spencer — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
30–35 cm. The crown and hindneck are dark brown, reaching just below the eye; the face is pale buff with a dark, diffuse smudge on the ear coverts. The bill is blue-grey with a dark culmen. Breast and flanks are buff with dark spots, the upperparts dark brown with pale edges. In flight it shows a glossy green speculum with a black band and a broad white trailing edge, and white underwings. The sexes are alike; the female is duller, with a less glossy speculum.
Confusion species
Red-Billed Teal Anas erythrorhyncha has a similar pattern of dark cap and pale cheek, but is much larger, with a red bill and a pale, buffy speculum. The female Garganey Spatula querquedula has a striped face with a pale supercilium and a grey bill. Cape Teal Anas capensis is grey with a pink bill and lacks the dark cap.
Habitat
Shallow fresh water with abundant floating and emergent vegetation: vleis, flooded grassland, floodplains, the reedy edges of dams, pans and sewage ponds. It dabbles or sieves in shallow water for seeds, water plants and invertebrates, often in the evening and at night. By day parties rest on the shore or among the plants. The nest is placed in dense vegetation over or beside the water.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
Widespread but local: the Okavango Delta and northern Botswana, northern Namibia, Zambia (including the Kafue Flats and Bangweulu), Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique, Angola, and in South Africa mainly the highveld, KwaZulu-Natal and the east; scarce in the Western Cape and absent from the dry western interior. Beyond the region in East Africa to Ethiopia, patchily in West Africa and on Madagascar.
- Resident
- Summer visitor (c. Oct–Mar)
- Winter visitor (c. Apr–Sep)
- Passage (Mar–Apr, Oct–Nov)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Scan the edges of vleis and reedbeds slowly, ideally from a hide at a sewage works or floodplain. A party of resting Blue-Billed Teal on the mud often shows up only once you pick out the dark cap and blue bill. In flight the white trailing edge to the wing with the green speculum is a good mark.
Conservation status
Not threatened and common in much of its range. Sensitive to drainage and the loss of vleis; benefits locally from sewage works and farm dams with well-developed marginal vegetation.
Scientific name
Spatula hottentota | (Eyton, 1838)
Eyton described the species in 1838 as Querquedula hottentota; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Spatula was introduced in 1822 by Boie. Spatula is Latin for 'spoon' or 'spatula', after the broad, spoon-shaped bill of the shoveler. hottentota refers to 'Hottentots', the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European name for the Khoikhoi of southern Africa, and thus to the region of origin; the term is now considered offensive and is not used outside this name. The specimen the first description was based on came from west coast of South Africa, near the Orange River.