The green-winged teal (Anas carolinensis) or American teal is a common and widespread duck that breeds in the northern areas of North America except on the Aleutian Islands. It was considered conspecific with the Eurasian teal (A. crecca) for some time, but the two have since been split into separate species. The American Ornithological Society continues to debate this determination; however, nearly all other authorities consider it distinct based on behavioral, Gmelin based his description on the "American teal" that had been described in 1785 by John Latham in his A General Synopsis of Birds and in the same year by Thomas Pennant in his Arctic Zoology . The genus name Anas is Latin for "duck". The specific epithet carolinensis means "of Carolina". The species is monotypic, with no subspecies accepted. Some authorities treat the green-winged teal as a subspecies of the Eurasian teal (Anas crecca); when lumped, the merged species is known as common teal.

Description

This is the smallest North American dabbling duck. The breeding male has finely barred gray flanks and back, with pale yellow under the tail at the rear end, and a white-edged green speculum, obvious in flight or at rest. It has a chestnut head with a green eye patch. It is distinguished from drake Eurasian teal (the Eurasian relative of this bird) by a vertical white stripe on side of breast, the lack of a horizontal white scapular stripe, and thinner or even no buff lines between the green and brown pattern on its head.

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Distribution and habitat

Flock of green winged teals

The American green-winged teal breeds from the Aleutian Islands, northern Alaska, Mackenzie River delta, northern Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, and Labrador south to central California, central Nebraska, central Kansas, southern Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ontario, Quebec, Newfoundland, and the Maritime Provinces. The young fledge 34 to 35 days after hatching or usually before 6 weeks of age. is that the American lineage is derived from stray Eurasian teals, with the founder effect/genetic drift and/or hybrid introgression phenomena applying as above, only in the reverse direction for the former two. Still, this would require loss of sexual dimorphism in the ancestors of the speckled teal, but while extremely rare in dabbling ducks, it is not per se impossible.

The close relationship of speckled and green-winged teals suggested by mtDNA data could of course still apply to the taxa in general, not just to sequences in two maternally inherited genes in a few individual ducks (for which it without doubt does apply), but the overall failure of Johnson & Sorenson to seriously take hybridization into account and their small sample sizes and obsolete conceptions of Indian Ocean biogeography do not help at all to resolve the issue, but in 1999, the methodology and interpretation were reasonable enough and in fact, the study was pioneering in many respects due to dense taxon-level sampling and still represents one of the default references for interpreting the phylogeny of the genus.

The post-copulatory displays of the common and green-winged teal are identical, but those of the speckled teal have some additional elements.

  • The Nature Conservancy: Green-winged teal
  • Green-winged Teal Species Account – Cornell Lab of Ornithology
  • Green-winged Teal – eNature.com
  • Green-winged Teal – Anas carolinensis – USGS Patuxent Bird Identification InfoCenter
  • Green-winged Teal at the Massachusetts Breeding Bird Atlas
  • An article about hybrid Common × Green-winged Teal