Pacific Black Duck

About the Pacific Black Duck

The Pacific black duck (Anas superciliosa), commonly known as the PBD, is a dabbling duck found in much of Indonesia, New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand, and many islands in the southwestern Pacific, reaching to the Caroline Islands in the north and French Polynesia in the east. It is usually called the grey duck in New Zealand, where it is also known by its Māori name, pārera.

The Pacific black duck was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae. He placed it with all the other ducks, geese and swans in the genus Anas and coined the binomial name Anas superciliosa. Gmelin based his description on the "Supercilious duck" that had been described in 1785 by the English ornithologist John Latham in his A General Synopsis of Birds. The naturalist Joseph Banks had provided Latham with a water-colour drawing of the duck by Georg Forster who had accompanied James Cook on his second voyage to the Pacific Ocean. His picture was drawn at Dusky Sound, a fiord on the southwest corner of New Zealand. This picture is the holotype for the species and is now held by the Natural History... Wikipedia →