Behavior
These birds feed by dabbling in shallow water at the edge of marshes or open water. They mainly eat plants; their diet may include molluscs and aquatic insects.
Blue-winged Teal are generally the first ducks south in the fall and the last ones north in the spring. Adult drakes depart the breeding grounds well before adult hens and immatures. Most Blue-winged Teal flocks seen after mid-September are composed largely of adult hens and immatures. The northern regions experience a steady decline in Blue-winged Teal populations from early September until early November. Blue-winged Teal in central migration areas tend to remain through September, then diminish rapidly during October, with small numbers remaining until December. Large numbers of Blue-winged Teal appear on wintering grounds in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas in September.
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“No one knows better than children how much they need the authority that protects, that sets the outer limits of behavior with known and prescribed consequences. As one little boy expressed it to his mother, “You care what I do.””
—Leontine Young (20th century)
“Consciousness is cerebral celebrity—nothing more and nothing less. Those contents are conscious that persevere, that monopolize resources long enough to achieve certain typical and “symptomatic” effects—on memory, on the control of behavior and so forth.”
—Daniel Clement Dennett (b. 1942)
“The type of fig leaf which each culture employs to cover its social taboos offers a twofold description of its morality. It reveals that certain unacknowledged behavior exists and it suggests the form that such behavior takes.”
—Freda Adler (b. 1934)