All species › Waterfowl › Ducks and geese › Southern Pochard
Southern Pochard | Netta erythrophthalma
Bruine krooneend | Pato Morado
The Southern Pochard is the only true diving duck of the region: a dark, compact duck that rides high on the water, dives repeatedly and shows a broad white wing bar in flight. The male stands out by its bright red eye in a blackish head.
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Voice
Usually silent. In display the male gives a soft nasal whine, prrr-eeow, the female a harsh rolling krrr-krrr, mainly in flight and on take-off.
No recording with a suitable Creative Commons licence is available for this species yet.
Identification
48–51 cm. The male is dark chestnut-brown with a blackish head and neck glossed purple, a red eye and a blue-grey bill with a black nail; the flanks are warmer brown. The female is dark brown with a white patch at the bill base, a pale throat and a striking white crescent curving down from behind the eye; her eye is brown. In flight both sexes show a broad white band across the secondaries and inner primaries. Juveniles resemble the female but have a less clean face pattern.
Confusion species
The female resembles the female Maccoa Duck Oxyura maccoa, but that species sits low in the water, has a thick broad bill, a stiff tail often cocked at an angle, and a pale cheek crossed by a dark horizontal stripe rather than a white crescent behind the eye. White-Backed Duck Thalassornis leuconotus is smaller, mottled tawny, with a white spot at the bill base but no wing bar. Dabbling ducks such as Yellow-Billed Duck Anas undulata do not dive and have a coloured speculum.
Habitat
Deep, open fresh water with submerged vegetation: dams, reservoirs, large vleis, pans, flooded grassland and sewage ponds. It dives to a few metres for seeds, roots and water plants, supplemented by aquatic insects and snails. Flocks rest out on open water. The nest is placed in dense marginal vegetation or floating reeds, close to the water.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
Local and erratic over much of the region: the highveld and Western Cape of South Africa, Lesotho and Eswatini, the Okavango Delta and pans of Botswana, mainly northern Namibia, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique and Angola. Scarce or absent in the dry Karoo and the Namib. Beyond the region in East Africa to Ethiopia, and with a separate subspecies in northern and western South America.
- 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
On larger dams and sewage works, scan the mixed duck flocks for birds that keep disappearing underwater. At midday the species often rests with its head tucked in; in the morning the male's red eye shows best in good light. After good rains it can appear suddenly in numbers on temporary pans, where moult concentrations also gather.
Conservation status
Not threatened and widespread, but numbers fluctuate strongly with rainfall. It benefits locally from dams and sewage works; locally sensitive to disturbance, drought and the draining of vleis.
Scientific name
Netta erythrophthalma | (Wied-Neuwied, 1833)
Wied-Neuwied described the species in 1833 as Anas erythrophthalma; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Netta was introduced in 1829 by Kaup. Netta is Greek, from nētta 'duck'. erythrophthalma comes from the Greek eruthros, 'red', and ophthalmos, 'eye', for the male's red eye. The specimen the first description was based on came from Belmonte, eastern Brazil.