Mallard
Get to Know
Of all the animals we share our cities and towns with, Mallards are one of the easiest to meet and get to know. They are the most abundant duck species in North America. These colourful ducks are common and abundant all year.
Male Mallards are very handsome and easy to identify in winter and spring. Their heads and necks are a beautiful shiny green, especially when the sun shines on them. They have yellow beaks, white rings around their necks, chestnut brown coloured breasts and curly tails. The females, which have orange bills, are not flashy at all. Females are coloured in combinations of browns, black and grey. When a pair is together on the water, the female often goes unnoticed because she is camouflaged so well against the shoreline. Good camouflage is very important when she sits on her eggs. Both sexes have a colourful wing patch called a speculum (pronounced 'SPECK-u-lum'). This patch is blue with white bars. You might see some ducks that look sort of, but not exactly, like a Mallard. Mallards can mate with domestic ducks as well as with other duck species, so hybrids are not uncommon.
If you have been around Mallards, you will be familiar with their quack quack. The female is the one that really quacks. It sounds just like 'Donald Duck'. The male gives a soft, short rhab sound.
Distribution and Habitat
Mallards are found throughout North America, as well as in Europe, Asia, and Africa. They are the most abundant during the winter when up to 10,000 Mallards can gather together. There are few natural sights so spectacular as seeing and hearing a huge flock of Mallards explode from the water into the air all at once.
Diet
Mallards are mostly vegetarian . They are dabbling ducks, meaning that they eat food off the surface of the water. About 90% of their diet is made up of seeds, grasses, sedges, pondweeds and other aquatic plants. They occasionally nibble on snails, insects and small fish. You will commonly see large flocks flying to and from grain fields, where they eat spilled or unharvested grain or grain that is being fed to cows. They will also pick at and recycle the droppings left on the ice where Canada Geese have spent the night.
Reproduction
Young Mallards pair up in their first winter. Several males court a single female, but she decides which one will be her mate. In spring, she selects a secretive site for nesting, usually on the ground amongst tall vegetation. To make the nest nice and cozy, she gathers old leaves and dried grasses and mixes them with down feathers that she plucks from her own breast.
She will usually lay a clutch of about 8 to12 eggs, which she covers with nest material when she is away from the nest. Covering them helps conceal the nest from predators and protects the eggs from the weather. Once her clutch is complete, she begins to incubate the eggs. The male leaves her to join other males to fly further north, sometimes as far as coastal Alaska. There, he loses his bright feathers and gets new ones that are brown like the female duck. When he is all brown like this, bird watchers say he is in his 'eclipse plumage '. Mallards usually have a different mate each year.
Young ducks hatch after about 28 days. Like all ducks, mallards have precocial (pronounced 'pre-KO-shal') young. Precocial means they can swim and feed by themselves almost right after they are born. As soon as their downy yellow feathers are dry, their mother leads them to the nearest body of water, which is sometimes up to 1 km or more away! She is a careful mother, keeping them warm under the safety of her feathers, and protecting them from predators. They are able to feed on their own, and are cute to watch as they zip about snatching insects from the water. Lucky for us, ducklings dine on massive numbers of mosquito larvae .
While she is looking after her fast-growing young, the female moults her worn feathers and is flightless for about a month. The young are capable of flight when they are between about 49 and 60 days old. At first, the young males' plumage is similar to that of their sisters and mother, but by November they get more colourful feathers although they may not get their brightest colours until their second year.