Appearance
This species has a large spatulate bill. Adults have speckled grey-brown plumage and dull orange legs. As with many southern hemisphere ducks, the sexes appear similar, but the male has a paler head than the female, a pale blue forewing separated from the green speculum by a white border, and yellow eyes. The female's forewing is grey.Cape shoveler can only be confused with a vagrant female northern shoveler, but is much darker and stockier than that species.
Naming
The Cape shoveler was described by the German ornithologist Ernst Hartert in 1891 under the present binomial name ''Spatula smithii''. The specific epithet commemorates the Scottish zoologist Andrew Smith.Status
The IUCN Red List sets the conservation status of the Cape shoveler as least concern.Behavior
This is a fairly quiet species. The male has ''rarr'' and ''cawick'' calls, whereas the female has a ''quack''.Food
It is a bird of open wetlands, such as wet grassland or marshes with some emergent vegetation, and feeds by dabbling for plant food, often by swinging its bill from side to side to strain food from the water. This bird also eats molluscs and insects in the nesting season. The nest is a shallow depression on the ground, lined with plant material and down, and usually close to water.References:
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