Northern Shoveler

• GeneralIt filters the water through its spatulate bill, lined with lamellae like a sieve.
• Its bill is the longest and broadest of any European dabbling duck: 63 mm of total culmen and 18 mm across, against the 35 mm of the Eurasian teal.
• That bill works as a sieve: it passes it through the surface of the water and traps the food particles between extremely fine lamellae.
• Its scientific name, clypeata, means "furnished with a shield", from the shape of the bill.
• Its spatulate bill, wider at the tip than at the base, carries comb-like lamellae with which it filters the water. The ducklings hatch with an ordinary duck bill, which broadens as they grow.
• Its bill is a strainer. Wider at the tip than at the base, it carries more than a hundred lamellae along the edge, like a miniature whale's baleen, with which it filters zooplankton from the water.
• It feeds by swimming with its bill submerged, sweeping it from side to side and filtering non-stop. It is the only European duck that habitually feeds this way.
• Sometimes several individuals swim in a tight circle, creating a vortex that draws the food up towards the surface.
• It forms longer-lasting pair bonds than most dabbling ducks.
• Its scientific name comes from the Latin clypeata, shield-bearer, after the shape of its bill.
• It sat in the genus Anas until the revision of the wildfowl moved it to Spatula, alongside the garganey and the southern-hemisphere shovelers.

Skeleton type

Vertebrate - internal bony skeleton (bird)

Habitat & environment

Shallow lagoons, saltmarsh and salt pans

Gestation / incubation

About 22 days of incubation, by the female alone

Litter / clutch size

9-11 eggs, laid around April

Sources consulted: Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution (datos morfométricos de anátidas europeas, material suplementario); IUCN Red List; Wikipedia; Boie 1822; Linnaeus 1758

Best time: Winter, in Spanish marshes and lagoons