Endangered
Bird Week
There are only about 2500 of these left total and they are the only species in their genus. They are a small duck endemic to New Zealand. There is a sort of fleshy bit at the end of their bill on both sides. That gives them an almost aquiline nose sort of look when seen from the side, and a rather judgemental look when seen from the front. Unfortunately there are a lot of threats to their survival such as dams, habitat loss, invasive predators (as well as naturally occurring ones), and more.
Whew, I barely got things done in time today. I decided to be productive and do our main grocery shopping trip first. My husband went with me which is nice, though after having shopped by myself for others for over a year now I do get a bit "you aren't shopping right!" unfortunately. We got back from shopping and I had decided I'd do a bird week. Great, birds are fun to paint. There were 460 birds to choose from, so yet another type of animal I could do a whole year of if I decided to go that route. Frogs and even primates are a lot more similar in design than birds are! I have narrowed the birds down to 53 of them so far. That is what I spent most of the day doing. I am sure that I could have found a lot more information about these ducks, but I ran out of time. I will continue to narrow things down tomorrow, but may do 2 weeks of birds just to get some of them done before I go back to random animals.