Did something today that I haven't done for many, many years; sat in a bird hide and painted! What a luxury; scope on a flat surface, bum on a (fairly) comfy seat - even a ledge for paints, pencils, water and pad! Clever folk these hide designers - course it helped that I had the place to myself as I was using up the space usually allocated for five people (including the very convenient disabled section, where the bench slides away at an angle - perfect!). Course I ended up doing ducks all the same, but this time a wigeon drake enjoying the relative warmth of 5 degrees after the sh!t of the past few days.
On my return I had the urge to compile a selection of 'my' ducks - so out with the sketches and the watercolours.
Ah yes, sketching in comfort, vaguely remember this Tim...
Results are telling all the same, what a wonderful Wigeon study, and a page of displaying Goldeneye, which are very, very good. For your interest found this online with regard to display, aparently the head throw is timed to within a split second...
"The problem of thoroughly analyzing such displays is not trivial. Benjamin Dane (now of Tufts University) and his colleagues studied 22,000 feet of film of displaying Common Goldeneyes. They used a stop-action projector to view each frame individually, counting frames (the film was exposed at a constant 24 frames per second) to determine the duration of a given display. It was thus possible to time each display accurately and to determine the probability of one display following another at each stage of the courtship. The projector was also used to analyze display-response interactions between individuals. One of the most interesting findings was the rather uniform timing of some of the displays -- the head-throw of the Goldeneye took an average of 1.29 seconds to perform, and some 95 percent of head-throws were timed at between 1.13 and 1.44 seconds."
"The great complexity of duck courtship displays probably has evolved because ducks tend to concentrate in small areas to breed, and closely related species often give their displays in plain view of each other (and of human observers, which makes them a joy to study). This has created considerable evolutionary pressure for each species to develop distinctive displays, so that hybridization among different species displaying together will be minimized. Thus, for example, the displays of Barrow's Goldeneyes are very different from those of Common Goldeneyes until the precopulatory stage is reached. In spite of this, some hybrids between Barrow's and Common Goldeneyes occur, but with nowhere near the frequency of hybrids between Mallards and Black Ducks, which have very similar displays."
Interesting. A lazy headbanging Common Goldeneye thus can attract sexual attention from Barrows, causing children of mixed race. What a minefield that is....