On a glorious autumnal day, the sparkling waters of the Waterworks Reserve’s reservoirs were dotted with an equally sparkling flock of white-eyed ducks.
The white-eyes were still in their crisp summer breeding plumage, chocolate heads and their bodies carrying a hint of chestnut, white tails and shining white eye which gives the species its common name.
The ducks are only occasional visitors to the reserve – usually seen out of the breeding season, in winter – and with a little cynicism I speculated for a moment that they might be escaping areas of the state which were in the grip of the duck-hunting season.
And then I realised that out of the five species of duck the wildfowlers are allowed to hunt from March to June, the white-eyes are not among them.
The opening of the duck-hunting season, which occurred just a few days before I spotted the ducks in question, always causes great controversy in not just Tasmania but the other two states were the hunt is permitted, Victoria and South Australia, and the Northern Territory.
I’ve never been a duck hunter myself but in the past I have found myself reluctantly accepting an argument advanced by the duck-hunting fraternity in Europe and the United States that they buy wetlands, stumping up money to keep these fragile environments out of the hands of developers and their reclamation schemes. In turn, the surviving wetlands have provided a home for not just common species of ducks but other waterbirds, some of them endangered.
In Australia this argument is complicated by the fact that wildfowl are largely hunted on public land. Also there is a question of what should be allowed to be hunted in times of drought. In Tasmania, for instance, many of the wildfowl found here are migrants from the mainland, escaping drought there.
The Tasmanian Government points to healthy populations of all duck species but conservationists maintain this represents a distorted picture. Birds might appear common, but these are simply the ducks that have vanished from other parts of the south-eastern mainland. Overall, duck populations are in decline.
The argument that there has been a mass movement of ducks across Bass Strait in recent years is supported by the fact species usually only found on the mainland have been finding their way to Tasmania.
A rarity on the mainland, the freckled duck, has taken up residence at Goulds Lagoon at Austins Ferry and there have been sightings of another uncommon mainland waterfowl, the pink-eared duck.
In fact last moth I searched in vain for pink-eared ducks spotted in the Sorrell area and finally had to settle for the white-eyed ducks at my home reserve, for my autumn duck fix.
But I regard the white-eyes, also called hard-head ducks for reasons I’ve never been able to establish, as beautiful as any ducks to be seen in Tasmania, including the exotic visitors and those allowed to be hunted: the black duck, chestnut and grey teal, wood duck and mountain duck.