All species › Waterfowl › Ducks and geese › White-Faced Whistling Duck
White-Faced Whistling Duck | Dendrocygna viduata
Witwangfluiteend | Suirirí Cariblanco
The White-Faced Whistling Duck is an upright, long-necked duck with a white face on a black head, which rests in dense, noisy flocks on muddy shores. The clear three-note whistling of flocks passing overhead, also at night, is one of the characteristic sounds of well-watered savanna.
Voice
A clear, high three-note whistle, swee-swee-sweeoo, heard throughout the day and at night, in flight and on landing; flocks call over one another to form a chorus.
Recording: Romuald Mikusek — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
43–48 cm, with a long neck and long grey legs. The face and forehead are white, the hindcrown and hindneck black; in some birds the white is stained rusty by iron-rich water. The neck and breast are warm chestnut, the flanks finely barred black and white, the belly black and the back brown with pale fringes. The bill is blackish-grey. In flight the wings are uniformly dark, without a speculum, and the feet project. The sexes are alike; juveniles have a dingy grey-brown face instead of white.
Confusion species
Fulvous Whistling Duck Dendrocygna bicolor has the same shape and posture, but a wholly tawny head and underparts with a dark stripe down the hindneck, creamy flank stripes and a white U on the rump in flight. Juvenile White-Faced Whistling Ducks with a grey-brown face are identified by the finely barred flanks and the black belly.
Habitat
Pans, dams, rivers with sandbars, flooded plains, rice fields and vleis with shallow water and open margins. Highly social: rests by day packed together on mudbanks and feeds mainly at dusk and at night, dabbling and diving for seeds, tubers and aquatic insects. It nests on the ground in tall grass, not far from water.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
Common in the north and east of the region: the Okavango, the Chobe and northern Botswana, the Zambezi Region of Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Zambia, Malawi and Angola, and in South Africa mainly in KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga, Limpopo, Gauteng and Eswatini; in wet years far to the west and south. Beyond the region it occurs over much of tropical Africa, on Madagascar and in tropical 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
At sunset over well-watered savanna, listen for the whistling of passing flocks. By day, resting flocks on sandbars in the Okavango, along the Chobe and on the pans of Zululand are easy to study; search among them for Fulvous Whistling Ducks, which sometimes join the flocks.
Conservation status
Not threatened and numerous in the region; the building of dams has helped the species to expand in South Africa. It is hunted locally and can be vulnerable to avian botulism and to poisoning on rice and grain fields.
Scientific name
Dendrocygna viduata | (Linnaeus, 1766)
Linnaeus described the species in 1766 as Anas viduata; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Dendrocygna was introduced in 1837 by Swainson. Dendrocygna comes from the Greek dendron, 'tree', and the Latin cygnus, 'swan' — 'tree swan', because some whistling ducks perch or nest in trees. viduata is Latin for 'widowed, in mourning' — for the white face and black hindneck, reminiscent of mourning dress. The specimen the first description was based on came from Cartagena, Colombia.