Just another bird story

-- The many ways winged adults protect their young

A lone Black-bellied Mexican Whistling Duck and eight tiny chicks on an evening paddle. (Photo by Anita Westervelt)

Published August 22, 2026, in the McAllen Monitor

Story and photos by Anita Westervelt

Most everyone who has watched birds for any length of time has a great story of how adult birds protect their young.

One of the more famous stories in the Rio Grande Valley is of the killdeer feigning a broken wing that it drags on the ground and a limp, so a predator thinks it is an easy catch, when indeed, the adult bird is leading the danger away from its nest.

Piping plovers and sandpipers, ground nesting beach birds, will hunch low, bulk up their feathers and emit squeaks, pretending to be a scampering rodent to lure predators away from their chicks.

I wrote about a flock of purple martins that flew from their martin condo to a nearby grackle nest in a palm tree after an adult grackle raised an alarm. The full contingent of martins and grackles, squawking and diving into the canopy of the palm pretty quickly ejected a large barn owl.

Mobbing is an aggressive defense, especially when smaller birds team up. With loud, alarming bird calls, they dive-bomb and chase away predatory birds, cats and other threats.

The other evening, an adult Mexican black-bellied whistling duck led eight tiny chicks into the resaca waters from the shore at our back yard. (Lead photo above.) Close by, two adult whistling ducks did the same with their older brood of seven.

A pair of Black-bellied Mexican Whistling ducks with their brood of seven. (Photo by Anita Westervelt)

And then a big dog flew off a nearby retaining wall, rapidly paddling toward the second group of ducks.

One of the adult whistling ducks launched out of the water and splashed down on the far side of the dog’s head, wings spread on the water – a maneuver it repeated about every five seconds while the other adult led the seven chicks in the opposite direction.

After several splash flop/wing flap maneuvers, the dog headed back to shore. The defending duck returned to its family; they all lifted off and flew to the opposite shore. The adult with the tiny chicks had safely come back to our yard.

Earlier this summer, I got a lucky photograph of our visiting alligator, swimming sedately alongside a Muscovy duck, like they were the best of friends, as incredible as that sounds.

An American Alligator and Muscovy Duck sedately glide along the Resaca together. (Photo by Anita Westervelt)

The Muscovy eventually flew safely away. Curious, I asked Google, “how do ducks on the water avoid alligators?”

It appears they really can safely glide along together. Examples noted ducks avoid being caught by an alligator by remaining highly alert and also relying on rapid takeoff – the ability to launch themselves directly into the air from the water’s surface.

With a flock of floating ducks, when one spots a threat, like an alligator – or dog – it uses specific vocalization to warn the rest of the flock to either relocate or fly off. An alarm by one bird in a raft of cormorants triggers an instant, synchronized flush of the entire flock.

A raft of 30 Neotropic Cormorants on the Resaca. (Photo by Anita Westervelt)

An online discussion at Quora posited that alligators are opportunistic sit-and-wait predators and might prefer high-calorie meals like fish or turtles, rather than wasting energy chasing fast, agile birds.

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