Northern shovelers (Spatula clypeata), named for their shovel-shaped bills, like to find food in the shallow waters and soft, muddy bottoms of marshes.  Swishing their wide shovel-like bills back and forth, these ducks slurp up seeds, crustaceans, and aquatic invertebrates, and then sieve their food through the comb-like edges of their bill. If you can enlarge the second photo, you can see some of the 110 fine projections called lamellae that help to sift out the food as if straining it through a colander.

In this first photo, you can see flashy Mr. Shoveler with his drab Missus. She is smart not to be so flashy as she is the one who has to keep their eggs warm at nesting time. It’s best to stay camouflaged while guarding a nest.

I read an interesting anecdote on the site by the Cornell Lab about Mrs. Shoveler’s outlandish behaviour. When she is forced off her nest by a predator, she does her best to make the eggs in her nest unpalatable for the predator by pooping on them before she flees. I was skeptical about this and want to add that possibly, the researcher who came to this conclusion failed to recognize that possibly the mother bird was so scared by the predator that nature simply took its course  as she fled the nest. Something to think about … or perhaps rather not.

Can’t you just see Mr. Shoveler chuckling about that in the photo below?

“Excuse me while I scratch my itchy chin.”

So that’s the “scoop” from the shovelers.

Again, photo credits to my friend Sonia.