A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1068 entries
wigeon
The wigeon is a compact dabbling duck with a short blue-gray bill, the drake carrying a chestnut head with a cream forehead stripe and a gray body. It grazes grass rather than upending in water, so flocks feed on wet pasture and saltmarsh like small geese. The drake gives a clear rising two-note whistle that carries a long way and is one of the standard sounds of a winter estuary.
Etymology
The word came into English from French in the sixteenth century, and the French appears to descend from a Latin term for a small bird of some kind. Older English spellings include widgeon, still in general use, and the bird also carried the folk name whewer, from the whistle, which is a better name but lost the argument.
Notes
Wigeon flocks follow other birds. They graze the same swards as brent geese and wading swans and gather around them, taking advantage of vegetation the larger birds pull up, so a wigeon flock is often the sign of something else worth looking at. Winter numbers on British estuaries run to hundreds of thousands, arriving from Iceland, Scandinavia, and Russia.