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White-Backed Duck | Thalassornis leuconotus
Witrugeend | Pato Dorsiblanco
The White-Backed Duck is a small, compact diving duck with a large head, a short tail and a broad bill, which sits low in the water and spends much time submerged. The white back that gives it its name shows only in flight or when preening. Despite appearances it is related to the whistling ducks rather than to the true diving ducks.
Voice
A soft, rising whistled tu-wee or whee-whee, mainly on take-off and between members of a pair; also a low cooing. Largely silent.
Recording: Luke Goddard — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
About 40 cm, warm buff-brown with fine dark and pale barring on the back, flanks and breast; the head is speckled black on a creamy ground, with a conspicuous white spot between the bill base and the eye. The bill is blackish with yellow speckling and the eyes are dark. In flight, which is infrequent and low over the water, the white back and short unmarked wings stand out; the feet project beyond the tail. The sexes are alike; juveniles are duller, with a less sharply defined white spot.
Confusion species
Little Grebe Tachybaptus ruficollis sits just as low and dives in the same way, but is smaller, with a thin pointed bill, no white spot at the bill base and a rufous neck in breeding plumage. The female Maccoa Duck Oxyura maccoa has a pale stripe below the eye and a pale throat rather than a round spot, and often cocks its stiff tail. The female Southern Pochard Netta erythrophthalma is larger and uniformly dark brown, with a pale crescent behind the eye.
Habitat
Quiet, fairly deep fresh water with plenty of floating plants and fringing vegetation: pans, dams, still lagoons and flooded plains. It dives for up to half a minute for the seeds and tubers of water lilies and for insect larvae. The nest is a platform of plant material in the marginal vegetation, sometimes floating, close to open water.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
Scattered and local across the east and north of the region: Zimbabwe, the Okavango and northern Botswana, Mozambique, Zambia, Malawi and Angola, and in South Africa in KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga, Limpopo and on the highveld; it wanders to the Eastern Cape and the Zambezi Region of Namibia. Beyond the region it is scattered and local in sub-Saharan Africa, with a separate subspecies 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 quiet dams with water lilies in the early morning, when the birds rest along the edge of the floating leaves. Because they stay under for a long time, patience is needed; count after a dive and look a little further on. The white back shows only when a bird takes off or rears up to flap its wings.
Conservation status
Not threatened, but scarce and irregular across much of the region. It is sensitive to pans drying out or becoming overgrown, and to disturbance by boats and anglers. Locally it benefits from dams with stable water levels and floating vegetation.
Scientific name
Thalassornis leuconotus | Eyton, 1838
Eyton described the species in 1838 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. He introduced the genus Thalassornis in that same work. Thalassornis comes from the Greek thalassa, 'sea', and ornis, 'bird' — a rather misleading name for a duck that lives mainly on freshwater lakes and marshes. leuconotus comes from the Greek leukos, 'white', and notos, 'back' — for the white back, visible mainly in flight. The specimen the first description was based on came from Cape of Good Hope.