On 11 December Jan Harteman travelled to Utrecht to give a lecture on the conservation of endangered waterfowl. Jan is a passionate ornithologist and teacher at Aeres MBO Barneveld. In the late 1990s, he started Harteman Wildfowl, an organization aimed at breeding endangered waterfowl for conservation purposes, all from his own backyard. We started the evening at 7, and a group of 12 enthusiastic students attended. The evening was kicked off by a short quiz consisting of 5 questions to introduce attended to the subject and to test their current knowledge.

Jan started his lecture by telling us a bit about himself and showed through pictures how the breeding of waterfowl in his backyard has expended over the years. There are several species Jan works with such as the white-winged duck, madagascar teal, bear's Pochard, south georgia pintail, and magpie goose. For each species he explained his reasons for keeping them, the problems they face in their natural habitat, the difficulties in breeding and keeping the species in captivity, and how each species ended up in captivity with him. Jan’s aim for keeping these species is to maintain a healthy population so they can be outplaced for other breeding programs and help keep the species alive.

After the break Jan continued his lecture with a story about one of his white-winged wood duck females. This female went to a zoo in Singapore where they have a breeding program with the aim of creating a stable population which then can be released in large parts of Asia. Another story he told was about crossing two completely unrelated species in his aviary (a chiloé wigoen and a Philippine duck). Jan explained that in the chiloé wigoen and Philippine duck  are both monochromatic species, meaning that males and females have the same colouring. Offspring of this crossing however were sexually dichromatic, so males and females had different coloration (read the paper he published about this here: https://edepot.wur.nl/558751).

We finished the evening with another quiz to test how much attendees had learned. The three highest scores won The Handbook for Identification of Waterfowl by Frank S. Todd. We thanked Jan for providing us with a fascinating lecture with a wooden statue of a duckling to add to his waterfowl collection.

By Samantha Mager