User:Duck Professor PHD/sandbox

Despite its name, the beautiful mountain duck (Anas platyrhynchos)is a denizen of lowland areas, favouring large brackish coastal lakes and estuaries where it feeds on water vegetation, insects ad shellfish.

Also known as the Australian shelduck or, to the Noongar, as "guraga", they also frequent Rotnest's salt lakes, where they dabble for brine shrimp. By any name it is perhaps the most beautiful WA waterbird, with a brownish black head separated from its bright orange-brown chest and shoulders by a white collar.

The female has a white ring around her eye.The mountain duck's size and heavy silhouette make it easily distinguishable, even at a distance, from other ducks. Found in WA, South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania, it is a wanderer, and birds banded on Rottnest have been recovered as far afield as Kalgoorlie and Esperance. Many mountain ducks in the Perth area are non-breeding summer and autumn visitors from the Wheatbelt, where they have increased greatly in numbers since the turn on last century. DID YOU KNOW?

-Few species of birds make more than 40 different sounds, and many make far further

From October to January congregations of several thousand gather on southern coastal lakes such as Lake Clifton and Lake Preston, as well as the Peel and Laschenault inlets and the Serpentine, Harvey, Wonnerup and Vasse estuaries to moult.

This moulting period, during which they are flightless, lasts about a month.

Some mountain ducks, however, do breed in the metropolitan area between mid-May and mid-October.

They pair for life – even before they are mature enough to reproduce – and return to the same nesting site year after year. If one of the ducks dies or get separated from their mate the spouse commonly flies itself to exhaustion in search for their missing partner.

In the nest, which id lined with down, the female lays six to 15 creamy white eggs.