Ask Anne

Anne Hobbs, the Lab's public information specialist, shares these questions and answers from her email box.

Northern Shoveler

Tom Grey

Spinning Ducks

Q: Recently, I was reading an article about the direction an ice skater spins. Right-handed skaters spin counter-clockwise. Last summer I was at the local wildlife refuge taking pictures of ducks. A couple dozen shovelers, mostly in male-female pairs but a few singles, were swimming in circles. I read in Ducks, Swans, and Geese of North America that this is common feeding behavior. What impressed me the most was that all except for one pair were swimming counter-clockwise. As with skaters, might this not indicate that ducks are "right-winged" or "right footed?"

--Barb R.

A: I couldn't find any information about "footedness" in ducks, but it's quite possible that Northern Shovelers have a preference for spinning in one direction. Preferences for right or left have been found in other birds. New Caledonian Crows, for example, use stick tools in their bills to extract insects and grubs from crevices. Studies show that some birds consistently prefer to hold the stick protruding from the left side of their bill, while others always probe from the right.

Margaret Rubega, an expert on phalaropes, said that some individual phalaropes always spin in one direction while foraging, but others always spin in the opposite direction. She said there are "zero data" on what the proportion of lefties and righties might be. With shovelers, she said, the situation might be more complicated, especially when more than one bird is involved. Are they swimming in a particular direction for a physical reason? Do they join in the same direction as whoever spins first? Or are there individual preferences? Keep watching?maybe you'll come up with some clues.

Footprints

Q: I am a teacher who has been helping a student with a study on fingerprints. We came across some interesting information about some birds having fingerprints. Is this so? Which birds have fingerprints? Are they as specialized as human fingerprints?

--Marcia Basford
Hammond, Louisiana

A: There is no unique pattern on the bottom of a birds' foot that would enable you to identify one individual from another. However, different bird species have distinctive "footprints" that can give away their identity?something you can observe if you look for bird footprints in the wet sand on a beach. Two factors account for most of this variability. The first is the tough skin covering the foot. It may be smooth, broken up into overlapping scales, or divided into numerous small, irregular plates. The second factor has to do with the toe arrangements in a bird's foot. Most birds have four toes with one toe pointed backward, the others forward. Woodpeckers, however, have two toes that point forward and two that point more or less backward. On the other hand (no pun intended), Chimney Swifts have all four toes pointing forward.

Oak Titmouse

Tom Grey

Sudden Oak Death

Q: In the Autumn 2005 issue of BirdScope, I read the article about the Oak Titmouse. I was surprised that it did not mention sudden oak death as a threat to oak forests. Do you know if sudden oak death has played a part in the decline of the Oak Titmouse, or if it is expected to?

--Carla Porter
Sunderland, Maryland

A: We passed your question on to Walter Koenig, who is conducting research on how sudden oak death might affect California's birdlife. For his answer, please see the article Forest Diseases in this issue.

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu