Red-crested Pochard

• It is a diving duck that hardly dives: the Netta feed more like dabbling ducks, sieving the water, and only submerge reluctantly.
• It swallows gastroliths of less than 1 mm to grind up seeds, and that preference for small stones makes it less prone to lead poisoning from shotgun pellets than the northern pintail, the mallard or the common pochard.
• After the Chernobyl accident in 1986, red-crested pochards wintering in Pakistan were found with intermediate levels of radioactivity.
• It parasitises the nests of other ducks, such as the gadwall or the common pochard, laying its eggs in them.
• It is a diving duck that only half behaves like one: it dives to pull up submerged plants, but it also gathers them from the surface like a dabbling duck.
• It is almost strictly vegetarian, something uncommon among European diving ducks, and depends on meadows of submerged macrophytes that eutrophication destroys.
• The male is unmistakable: a reddish, puffed-up head with the look of a wig, an intense red bill and white flanks.
• It practises brood parasitism: females lay eggs in the nests of other females of their own species and of other ducks, which raise them without telling them apart.
• In Spain its populations depend on a handful of wetlands, which makes them vulnerable even though the species is globally listed as Least Concern.

Skeleton type

Vertebrate - internal bony skeleton (bird)

Habitat & environment

Lowland marshes and lakes of southern Europe, extending across the steppe and semi-desert areas of the Black Sea to Central Asia and Mongolia. It winters on the Indian subcontinent and in Africa

Size at birth

Precocial chicks covered in down, which reach flying ability between 45 and 68 days

Sexual maturity

12 months

Gestation / incubation

26-28 days of incubation, by the female alone

Litter / clutch size

6-12 pale green eggs

Sources consulted: IUCN Red List 2016 (e.T22680348A86012189); Camacho, C. y Molina, B. (Enciclopedia Virtual de los Vertebrados Españoles, MNCN-CSIC); Suárez y Uríos 1999; Mateo et al. 2000; Defos du Rau et al. 2005; Jobling 2010, The Helm Dictionary of Scientific Bird Names; Pallas 1773; Kaup 1829

Best time: All year round in the marshes and lagoons of eastern and southern Spain