Female mandarin ducks are hard to identify when there are large amounts of other duck species, so look out for a female with a male instead. Young female mandarin ducks look like large chicks, and young males look long necked like a grebe, with a mostly brown body with a few flecks of green and blue.
In summer, the male looses all of his colour except a triangle of green near the tail and his beak colour. He then resembles the female duck. [3] X Research source The female duck will not change colour at all, unlike the male.
The bill will either be coloured brown or bright red. A male’s bill is bright red and a female’s bill is brown. The bill looks a little like an albatross’s, but it is thinner and less curved with a smaller sharp tip at the bottom.
Note that the female has a slightly longer and more distinguishable s shaped neck, unlike the male’s, which is hidden by feathers. The baby mandarin ducks are like chicks; they hardly have a neck at all, but if you look closely, you can see a slight s shape like the adult female’s.
Sometimes the wood duck will have a fleck of white on its head, but the male mandarin duck can still be separated from a wood duck by looking at the colourful head. A female mandarin duck and female wood duck can easily be determined from each other. The female wood duck has a small fleck of purple which the female mandarin duck does not have, and the patch around the eye is a circle of white instead of a stripe.
This excludes the tail feather colours, which are in long triangles that are green or white. Some of the feathers overlap. Do not mistake these bumpy bits for circular shapes of one colour.
These are 3/4 of the way along their bodies on male mandarin ducks, and absent on female mandarin ducks. The ‘sail’ feathers are coloured peach, brown or orange on male mandarin ducks, and sometimes they have a little white stripe at the top.
These calls are usually made while the mandarin duck is in flight to alert the other mandarin duck that there is danger close by. Although the male mandarin duck’s call is high pitched, both sexes’ calls are quiet compared to other duck’s, and they do not usually make the regular quacking noise.
You can listen to recordings online to get a rough outline of what a mandarin duck’s call sounds like. While recording, look out for mandarin ducks flying overhead. The calls are usually made in flight.
Even if the quack is not made by a mandarin duck, it will indicate that there are ducks in the area, and more often than not, there are multiple duck species in a big group.
