Madagascar Pochard

Appearance

Juvenile ducks have brown irises and are a pale, dull brown or chestnut colour with a darker stomach. The adults are darker in colour, though during a male duck's first winter, its iris will turn white. Breeding males have dark chestnut heads, chins, throats, breasts, and necks, with blackish brown on the top side of the body.

Range and habitat

The species exclusively lives in inland wetlands in Madagascar, where it is endemic. Currently, the only wild populations are at Lake Sofia and Lake Matsaborimena. Historically, the birds preferred shallow lakes and marshes with dense vegetation. Even so, the rediscovered population was found in a cold, deep crater lake that had few aquatic plants and was surrounded by heavy forest, and other remote crater lakes may have been inhabitable due to the birds' requirements for shallower water.

In Autumn 2017 the population reached 90, causing the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust and the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust to begin preparations for the reintroduction process at a suitable lake in Madagascar, Lake Sofia, among them working with the communities surrounding the lake.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Diet and breeding

Madagascar pochards do not migrate, do not usually form flocks, and are usually found in pairs or as single ducks. The diet is dominated by aquatic insects. A study examining their faeces found that caddisflies were the most commonly found insect, followed by dragonfly larvae, bugs (Hemiptera) and flies from the family Chironomidae.

Stable isotope analysis and the faecal studies have shown that their diet includes very little plant material, that is unusual when compared to their relatives in the genus Aythya. Ducklings feed on the surface until they are old enough to dive, at around 14 days, and make shorter dives once they do dive (around 10 seconds). By 2017, a captive breeding program had produced a population of around 90 individuals.

In crisis

Thought to be extinct in the late 1990s, specimens of the species were rediscovered at Lake Matsaborimena near Bemanevika in Madagascar in 2006. The birds were reintroduced to the wild in December 2018. The Madagascar pochard feeds mainly on aquatic insects, unlike other diving ducks in the same genus, The population is small, fluctuating around 25 individuals, and mainly utilises two small volcanic lakes in the far north of Madagascar.

Reared in captivity, they hatched eighteen ducklings in April 2012 at the captive breeding centre in Antsohihy, bringing the total population to 60. 2011 marked the first chick to hatch from captive breeding efforts. In April 2013, the population reached 80.

Madagascar Pochard is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.

Sources

Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Madagascar Pochard, Wikidata item Q853318. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.