Passing Migrants - the Marbled Teal - Will Fly Away from Pakistan in August

Habitat-improvement projects needed

Approximately 40 centimetres long, the adult marbled teal is of a pale sandy-brown colour, diffusely blotched off-white with dark eye-patches and a shaggy head. The chicks are similar but have more off-white blotches. The birds are gregarious, even when nesting, sometimes, and flocks are usually smaller outside the breeding season. They feed mainly in shallow water by dabbing or up-ending and occasionally diving. The global population of the species is believed to lie at somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000, with the bulk recorded in China, Japan, India, Russia, Iran, Afghanistan and the Central Asian states.

In the book Birds of Pakistan, bird-watcher T.J. Roberts notes that the marbled teal’s visits to Balochistan’s Sirandah Lake were recorded in 1913 and 1915, and to the Khushdil Khan Lake in 1920 and 1927.

The birds were sighted at Balochistan’s Zangi Nawar Lake in 1942 where it bred until the 1980s when the lake dried up. Subsequently, the species started migrating to Sindh where the lakes of the Nara Game reserve, Deh Akro II and Sanghar district became its preferred breeding habitat. Conservationists suggest that the government initiate conservation and habitat-improvement projects to help increase the population levels of the species and bring them to sustainable levels. They maintain that non-governmental organisations working in the conservation field should extent assistance to the government in this regard.