Female Ring-necked Duck with male Common Pochard, Weeze, Germany, Mar 2025

Male Ring-necked Duck with male Tufted Duck at Lake Constance, Germany, Jan 2026

Whatever odd female Scaup-like diving duck with Tufted male, Lake Constance, Germany, Jan 2026

Male hybrid Ferruginous Duck x Common Pochard, Lake Constance, Germany, Jan 2026.

I feel kind of challenged by today's topic of #BirdOfTheDay, and ducks always provide a fair share of #OddCouples 🙂

2 male Ring-necked Ducks, Ferruginous Duck x Common Pochard with both parental species, Greater Scaup females with a duck that might be a Greater x Lesser Scaup female. I did not find the reported Lesser Scaup female in Moos, seeing two Red-throated Loons in the distance made up for it.

A day and a half waterfowl birding around Lake Constance at the end of January resulted in some good observations. Almost with a touch of North America...
#birds #BirdHybrid #birding #vagrants

That's a great idea! Fully agree that it does not match any RND hybrid phenotype.

This one is confusing me a bit.... the one in the front, obviously :-) #birdhybrids #birds #ducks
Picture from ornitho.ch by Nicolas Aregger in Alpnach (CH), Jan 11th. Speculation is Ring-necked x Tufted duck or x Lesser Scaup or even pure Lesser, which I exclude based on the nail. Thoughts?

Well, when looking at my home patch in Western Germany, it seems Tree Sparrows haven't found the right gene to duplicate for survival yet.... :-( Pretty suitable habitat, have not seen any in 15 years.

How often do Barrow’s Goldeneye and Common Goldeneye hybridize? A genetic study detected only one hybrid individual.

Your daily Avian Hybrids story!

How often do Barrow’s Goldeneye and Common Goldeneye hybridize?
avianhybrids.wordpress.com/2021/08/11/h...

#ornithology

Yeah, it's a bit noisy, but I believe RND, maybe female, in its first year is a safe bet. The other option might have been Redhead female, but head shape, face pattern and color don't look quite right.

I'd say 1cy Ring-necked Duck, but probably the original photo is more revealing 😉

So it could have been the same bird given the timing, but not necessarily since Sal is some 50 km (?) away and the bird has been observed until Oct 21st. But who knows...

Looks like a female-type, and you are cited 🙂 Was the one on Boavista also a female?

Perfect, he is apparently doing a great job in continuing the work of a number of Dutch birders from the 90s into the 2010s. Enjoy Boavista!

I also came across your blog post on the issues with e-bird coverage of Cape Verde and thought that this Facebook group might be of interest for you:
www.facebook.com/groups/44063...
Mainly in German, but relevant information easy to get.

Dear Stephen, thanks for sharing this! I am collecting data on RNDs in the Western Palearctic, just fun (e-)birding, I'm interested in patterns of occurrence, but also confounders like increase in observer knowledge, more reporting due to tools like e-bird.

Hi Paul, eBird says yes, drake and female were observed since Sep. However, numbers may still get higher in that location.

Balearic shearwater

Pervasive and recurrent hybridization prevents inbreeding in Europe’s most threatened seabird #ornithology #seabirds @ub.edu ‪@irbio-ub.bsky.social‬ www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Yeah, I read something quite disturbing about humans and pigs when digging a bit deeper....🫣

Actually, quite interesting dispute 🙂

Is the Labrador Duck a Common Eider x Steller’s Eider hybrid? No This is a joint post with my long-time friend and colleague Michelle Wille, a PhD candidate at Linnaeus University in Sweden A recent blog post hypothesizing that the now-extinct Labrador Duck was …

Oops, and I see it may be a rather controversial discussion....
labandfield.wordpress.com/2014/02/26/i...

The Curious Case of the Mysterious Labrador Duck: Extinct species or misidentified hybrid? Hardly anyone has ever heard of the Labrador Duck, unlike the Passenger Pigeon or the Carolina Parakeet few mourn its passage into extinction. This lost species of diving sea duck was formerly found f...

www.christopherpackard.com/post/the-cur...

Labrador Duck - Not extinct after all? Was the "extinct" Labrador Duck a hybrid (Steller's Eider × Common Eider) that still occurs occasionally today?

www.macroevolution.net/labrador-duc...

Dear Jente, thanks for bringing this up again. I recalled stumbling over blogs mentioning that the Labrador Duck may not have been a species at all and therefore tried to find what I read some years ago. I came across McCarthy's blog and someone citing his work from 2021. Has this been solved?

#BirdHybrid @bksandercock.bsky.social

So, given that RNDs team up with Common Pochards in Europe regularly, this hybrid is an option here, but we can never be certain. It is probably as close as we can get to this hybrid. The phenotypic overlap between Pochard hybrids with RNDs and Tufted Ducks may just make the ID unreliable.

Interestingly, a strikingly similar Aythya was observed about 1000 km SSE in Finland 2 weeks earlier that was ID'd as Tufted x Pochard (7), but pretty much is in line with the description of Rigbäck as well (8).

The grey flanks are similar to (3), but here the contrast between back and flanks is less pronounced, no white spur, eyes can be yellowish-orange, but are usually lighter. In addition, there is always some brownish hue at the breast, flanks or back.

Bill shape of (1) would be within the variation of (2). The flanks of (1) appear greyish with a white anterior spur that somewhat resembles RND (cf. Rigbäck below) and is seen in (2). Tufted x Pochard (4-6) do not show this, however beginning molt could be an explanation.

(1) shows a head shape that resembles RND and its hybrids, but Tufted x Pochard and Pochard x Ferruginous can have similar shapes. The black breast seems more extended than (2) and the subterminal white band of (1) at the bill is broader than usually seen in hybrids of type (2).

I put together some representative pictures of Canvasback x Ring-necked Duck (2), Tufted Duck x Pochard (4-6) and Pochard x Ferruginous (3) hybrids that each resemble the "mystery duck" (1) as much as possible.

Some more in depth analysis of this bird. Tufted x Common Pochard was my first thought and it cannot be excluded in the end.