Tufted Female or Scaup or Cross? Nara Japan (1 Viewer)

I saw this duck today in Nara on our local pond.

Is it just a Tufted Duck female with both the white bill base and the white rear which some have (though I couldn't see any sign of a tuft)? Or is it a female Greater Scaup? Or could it be some kind of cross?

The feature that's bugging me is the black of the back coming down to the base of the duck forming a significant border between the white rump and the paler side panel. In my books (photo and drawing) the paler (than the back) side-panel continues to the white rump with no black section in between.

Within range of 'normal' Tuftie for me. But that's not to say it might not have some Scaup genes in it from somewhere in its ancestry, a bit like most Humans have a few % Neanderthal genes from hybridisation way back when.

Nutcracker said:

Within range of 'normal' Tuftie for me. But that's not to say it might not have some Scaup genes in it from somewhere in its ancestry, a bit like most Humans have a few % Neanderthal genes from hybridisation way back when.

Click to expand...

Even more on some of the sub-forums😜8-P

Thanks. We don't get so many around here that I am good with expected variation. If this pattern is OK for pure Tufted Duck, then that's great. This would presumably have to be an eclipse male? I had the impression that the white bill patch and white rump were female features, but I seem to have been mistaken. And I didn't think the male head could be so brown and (all the time I was looking), so apparently tuftless.

However, when I mentioned the possibility of a cross, I wasn't thinking about Tufted x Scaup particularly or only, but also some other possibility. I was wondering where that rump pattern came from with a clear black band between the pale side and the very white rear because I didn't think it was a Tufted pattern. The only bird in any of my books - drawing and photo - which shows this is a Common Pochard x Baer's Pochard cross, and we had one of these on the same small pond for several years which also showed this (the pattern comes from the Baer's side, I think). But the front of the bird doesn't fit Pochard x Baer's. In birds of Europe, the wildfowl hybrids page shows this pattern for Pochard x Ferruginous, for example (one or two Ferruginous turn up in our area every year, and also one or two Baer's). So, I wondered if it might even be a quarter something (cross x pure). The pond where it was is the Pochard pond, and this bird was alone which is unusual for Tufted in my experience.

The attached photo shows the Pochard X Baer's where you can see the rump pattern.

Thanks again for your help.

I´d agree with the initial bird being in the range of Tufted duck.

Thank you.

Just as a matter of interest, someone in our area who posts a blog put up some photos today claiming (without giving a reason) that the blog showed photos of a Pochard x Baer's cross. I don't think it is (the bird in my post #4 is definitely one; however, there is the possibility of a male cross and a female cross being different), but it still looks quite a bit like the bird I posted at the head of this thread; in the third photo, you can see white at the base of the bill. These photos weren't (I'm pretty sure) taken at the same place, so it's not the same bird, and this person uses 50x zoom point and shoot 'bridge camera' so the colours may not be great. But I wonder if anyone has any comments about it.