Tadorna tadorna
A big, boldly patterned duck that looks more like a small goose.
Size: 58-67 cm | Habitat: Pond, Lake & River Birds | Season: All year
Unmistakable among UK ducks, the shelduck is a large, strikingly patterned bird with a bottle-green head, chestnut breast band, and a bright red bill. Mainly a coastal species, it has increasingly spread inland to gravel pits and reservoirs.
White body · dark green head and neck · chestnut breast band · bright red bill · black belly stripe
Shelducks feed by sifting invertebrates from mud with a side-to-side sweeping motion of the bill, typically on estuaries and mudflats, though inland birds forage around gravelly lake edges.
Most of Britain's shelducks fly to the Wadden Sea off Germany in late summer to moult all their flight feathers at once, leaving them flightless for several weeks.
The Shelduck (Tadorna tadorna) is a large, boldly patterned waterbird — more like a small goose than a typical duck — with a white body, bottle-green head, chestnut breast band, and a bright red bill.
Primarily a coastal species, shelducks feed on estuary mudflats by sweeping their bills side to side to sift out small invertebrates, but they have increasingly colonised inland gravel pits and reservoirs with sandy margins. Most of the UK's shelducks migrate to the Wadden Sea off Germany and Denmark each late summer to moult in huge, vulnerable flocks.
This mass moult migration makes shelducks a good example of how a "common" UK bird can still depend heavily on a single vulnerable site abroad for part of its life cycle — a reminder that conservation often has to think beyond national borders.
🟠 Conservation status: Amber (UK Birds of Conservation Concern 5)
Amber-listed under BoCC5 reflecting a historic population decline, with some recovery in recent decades, and the species' reliance on a small number of key moulting and wintering sites.