Waterfowl

Waterfowl is not a scientific term, but rather an amateur one. According to him, birds are united by a common name, proceeding from a common way of life for them. This is the same if we combine the common term "marine animals" of whales, jellyfish and fish, which according to the generally accepted scientific classification refer to different taxonomic groups.

Waterfowl are birds that can stay on the water surface. Thus, not all birds that lead the aquatic life and feed in water bodies are waterfowl. Bright evidence of this - cranes and storks. Food they produce primarily in shallow water - in swamps or in the coastal strip of lakes. They do not need to master the art of staying on water, as they grab their food with a long beak. Therefore, they do not have the features of the structure of the foot, characteristic of waterfowl - the membrane between the fingers, which play the role of flippers.

Another distinctive feature that waterfowl have is dense plumage and the presence of a special sebaceous gland, the secret of which is to lubricate feathers, preventing them from getting wet.

Waterfowl are either predators or omnivores. "Strict vegetarians" are not among them. Each species "specializes" on its stern, so different waterfowl quite calmly share one marsh, a lake or a part of the sea surface, occupying a specific ecological niche.

Seagulls, for example, grab fish from the surface of the water, cormorants dive after it to depth from the height of flight, and duck-dives dive from the surface of the water. Some species when they get food only dip their heads into the water. And then everything depends on the length of the neck. The swan is able to grab food from a fairly considerable depth, and a duck that does not belong to dives is much smaller. And all are full, and no one to no one is in a claim.

In Russia, the region where waterfowl has always been in huge quantities, is the Arctic, the Far East and the surrounding areas. Adhering to traditional life indigenous peoples of the north in the hunting season harvested such birds literally thousands. Then they were smoked, salted, frozen on glaciers and fed on their meat in a long polar winter.

The modern north, according to the northerners, has become much poorer in this respect, and the situation has changed about the last twenty-five to thirty years. What is the fault - whether uncontrolled hunting, or the destruction of nesting sites, or even some unaccounted factor - ornithologists have not yet found out. And it is not possible to determine how much the stock has declined. Although the birds, in the opinion of the northerners, have become smaller, the number of them is still so great that it is weakly accountable. That is, "less" is subjective-valued, and in figures no one can determine how this "less" looks.

Floods of large rivers are also places where many waterfowl live, although in smaller quantities than in the North. And if the expanse of birds on the rivers of sparsely populated Siberia, in the European part of the country, where the density of population is much higher, their number is directly affected by the human factor in the form of banal hunting, including poaching.

Of great importance are technogenic catastrophes, and simply human economic activity, which often destroys places where waterfowl traditionally live. Photos of gulls dying from oil spill and other similar "delights" have long become commonplace of ecological photo exhibitions. Alas…