What type of bird is a gadwall?
Coues's gadwall Coues's gadwall Coues's gadwall or Washington Island gadwall ("Mareca strepera couesi") is an extinct dabbling duck which is only known by two immature specimens from the Pacific island of Teraina, Line Islands, Kiribati. They are in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.. The bird was named in honor of Elliott Coues. A male and a female are known, which resemble the immature appearance of the common gadwall except for the black bill with a higher number of fuiltering lamellae, black feet, and the much inferior size (which may be due to the birds not being fully grown).
Coues's gadwall a bit larger. The status of this bird is controversial. While many scientists consider it as a dwarfed subspecies of the common gadwall ("Anas strepera strepera") others argue that the two individuals might have been just juveniles of a local breeding population that might not even be taxonomically distinct. The common gadwall is a known vagrant to the Tuamotu Islands (Kolbe wrote "Tahiti which is a misreading of Greenway) and Hawaiʻi for example, which are about the same distance from the species' breeding grounds as is Teraina (which moreover lies in between these two groups). This makes it entirely possible