These black bellied whistling ducks were hanging out as usual in a private pond near to the Terry Hershey Trail and Buffalo Bayou in Houston. Piercing whistles show that they fully deserve their name. This is a popular spot for birds. Here they were joined by cormorants and then a snowy egret.
These black bellied whistling ducks were hanging out on the lake at Houston’s Hermann Park last March.
In the photos you can easily pick out the characteristic white eye ring, brown top knot, and black belly and tail.
These birds are resident all year, and often make themselves known with a chorus of whistles.
Sometimes you ‘see’ an image that is just a perfect colour combination. These black bellied whistling ducks were serenely progressing through the green covering on a lake in Terry Hershey Park, Houston, and almost immediately disappeared beneath the overhanging vegetation. I just managed to grab a couple of shots that weren’t too bad.
I particularly like this one, cropped, that I’ve included at higher resolution.
There is usually a gang of about 50 or so whistling ducks hanging around in Terry Hershey Park when we visit Houston. They are quite notable for their whistling habit.
This particular variant is called the black bellied whistling duck, for obvious reasons, found all year round in South East Texas.
Wikipedia lists 8 variants of whistling duck, or tree duck, and suggests that they are not actually true ducks but “a subfamily, Dendrocygninae, of the duck, goose and swan family”. They do look sort of intermediate between duck and goose.
