Marbled Teal

About the marbled teal

The marbled teal, also called the marbled duck, is a medium-sized duck native to southern Europe, northern Africa, and western and central Asia. Its scientific name, Marmaronetta angustirostris, blends the Greek words for "marbled" and "duck" with the Latin for "narrow-billed," a nod to its appearance. Adults are a pale, sandy brown overall, diffusely blotched with off-white markings, and have a dark patch around the eye and a somewhat shaggy-looking head. The sexes look alike, though females average slightly smaller than males; juveniles resemble adults but carry more off-white blotching. In flight, the wings appear pale and unpatterned, without the bright wing-patch, or speculum, seen on many other ducks.

The species is gregarious, often gathering in flocks even during the nesting season, and it has something of a nervous, flighty temperament — a trait noted even among the marbled teal kept in captive collections. Outside the breeding season, flocks are usually small, though large wintering concentrations do form in some parts of the range, with the biggest known gathering recorded in Khuzestan, Iran.

Behavior and diet

Marbled teal feed mainly in shallow water, dabbling at the surface or up-ending to reach food below. Adults eat mostly seeds, including those of Scirpus and Ruppia plants, but they also take a substantial share of invertebrates — aquatic insect larvae and pupae, small crustaceans, and, unusually for a duck, ants — along with green plant material such as Potamogeton. A muscular gizzard lets adults break down tougher seeds, while comb-like structures in the bill, called lamellae, allow them to filter tiny zooplankton from the water. Young marbled teal feed mostly on invertebrates rather than seeds, since they lack the well-developed gizzard adults use to process larger seeds.

Nests are built at the water's edge, typically on the ground and hidden under dense vegetation, though pairs sometimes nest higher up among reeds or in huts made of reed material. A clutch averages around 12 eggs. The species shows nomadic tendencies, with birds dispersing from breeding grounds and turning up in winter as far south as the Sahel zone below the Sahara.

Range and habitat

The marbled teal formerly bred in large numbers throughout the Mediterranean region, but breeding is now largely restricted to a scattering of sites: southern Spain, southern Italy, northwest Africa, and parts of the broader Levant. Further east, it persists in the Mesopotamian marshlands of southern Iraq and in Iran, where the Shadegan Marshes are described as the single most important site for the species worldwide. Smaller, isolated populations survive in Armenia, Azerbaijan, southern European Russia, western India, and western China. Preferred breeding habitat is temporary, shallow water — fresh, brackish, or alkaline — with densely vegetated shorelines in otherwise dry landscapes, though the species also uses coastal lagoons, slow-moving rivers, and man-made waters such as reservoirs. In 2011, ornithologists in Iraq counted a single flock on the country's marsh lakes numbering at least 40,000 birds, a notable concentration for a species considered rare across much of its range.

Conservation status

The marbled teal is classified as Near Threatened by the IUCN, a status driven by population declines linked to habitat destruction and hunting pressure across its range. It is one of the species covered by the Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds (AEWA).