Coues' gadwall
| Coues's gadwall | |
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| Illustration of a male and female gadwall, with a male Coues's gadwall, by Louis Agassiz Fuertes | |
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Extinct (1874)
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| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Aves |
| Order: | Anseriformes |
| Family: | Anatidae |
| Genus: | Mareca |
| Species: | M. strepera |
| Subspecies: | †M. s. couesi |
| Trinomial name | |
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Mareca strepera couesi (Streets, 1876) |
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| Synonyms | |
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Coues's gadwall or Washington Island gadwall (Mareca strepera couesi) is an extinct dabbling duck which is only known by two immature specimens from the Pacific island of Teraina,Line Islands, Kiribati. They are in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.. The bird was named in honor of Elliott Coues.
A male and a female are known, which resemble the immature appearance of the common gadwall except for the black bill with a higher number of fuiltering lamellae, black feet, and the much inferior size (which may be due to the birds not being fully grown). The male resembles a male common gadwall in eclipse plumage save for some white speckling on the breast and back. The female looks like a small common gadwall female; the primary wing coverts were not patterned black, and the inner web of the secondary remiges was grey instead of white.
Measurements are: wing, 19.9 cm; bill, 3.7 cm; tarsus 3.6 cm. This means the birds were the size of a Cape teal or garganey, with a total length of 40–45 cm. As the birds were not fully adult when shot, it is not clear whether they would not have grown a bit larger.
The status of this bird is controversial. While many scientists consider it as a dwarfed subspecies of the common gadwall (Anas strepera strepera) others argue that the two individuals might have been just juveniles of a local breeding population that might not even be taxonomically distinct. The common gadwall is a known vagrant to the Tuamotu Islands (Kolbe wrote "Tahiti which is a misreading of Greenway) and Hawaiʻi for example, which are about the same distance from the species' breeding grounds as is Teraina (which moreover lies in between these two groups). This makes it entirely possible that the Washington Island gadwalls were just the offspring of a few vagrant common gadwalls, maybe settling after being wounded by hunters. On the other hand, Streets' reports suggest that there was a population of these ducks of some size present, and thus they may have lived there since quite some time and indeed be worthy of recognition as a distinct taxon.
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Wikipedia