A small African diving duck with a body built more like a tiny submarine than a typical dabbling duck. Its plumage is a rich mix of dark brown and black with warm, ochre flecks, which helps it blend perfectly into mats of waterlilies and reeds. The “white back” that gives it its name isn’t usually obvious when the bird is resting; you really notice it in flight or when it droops its wings, revealing a pale patch across the upper back. With its chunky body, fairly long neck, and feet set well back, it looks and moves quite differently from familiar pond ducks, hinting at its more secretive, underwater lifestyle.
One of the coolest things about the white-backed duck is that it’s one-of-a-kind: it’s the only living member of its genus, Thalassornis. Genetic studies show that it’s most closely related to the whistling ducks, but it also shares some features with stiff-tailed ducks, making it a bit of a “hybrid-feeling” outlier on the duck family tree. Instead of paddling around on the surface, it spends much of its time diving, sometimes staying underwater for up to half a minute.
It feeds mainly on water plants, especially the bulbs, seeds, and leaves of waterlilies and other aquatic vegetation, and young birds also snap up insect larvae in the shallows. When danger appears, it usually chooses to dive and vanish rather than fly away, disappearing under the lily leaves like a stone in a pond.
The white-backed duck lives across much of sub-Saharan Africa, from West Africa through East Africa down to South Africa, and there’s also a special island subspecies on Madagascar. It favors quiet lakes, ponds, swamps, and floodplains with plenty of floating and emergent plants. In places with the right conditions, it can be locally common, especially outside the breeding season when hundreds may gather on permanent wetlands.
Distribution
Angola
Benin
Botswana
Burkina Faso
Burundi
Cameroon
Chad
Congo-Brazzaville
DR Congo (Kinshasa)
Eswatini
Ethiopia
Kenya
Lesotho
Madagascar
Malawi
Mali
Mauritania
Mozambique
Namibia
Nigeria
Rwanda
Senegal
Somalia
South Africa
South Sudan
Sudan
Tanzania
Togo
Uganda
Zambia
ZimbabweAnything we've missed?
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Terrestrial / Aquatic
Altricial / Precocial
Polygamous / Monogamous
Dimorphic (size) / Monomorphic
Active: Diurnal / Nocturnal
Social behavior: Solitary / Pack / Flock
Diet: Carnivore / Herbivore / Omnivore / Piscivorous / Insectivore
Migratory: Yes / No
Domesticated: Yes / No
Dangerous: Yes / No
