Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos)
Overview: Mallards are large dabbling ducks with orange feet, white underwings, and a bright blue speculum bordered on both sides by white. Male has an iridescent green head with a narrow white collar and a yellow bill. Body is grayish with a chestnut breast, and black central tail feathers curl up. Female is mottled brown with a whitish tail and an orange bill marked with black. Juvenile and eclipse males resemble female, but bill is dull olive.
Field marks: Males are easily identified by glossy green head, gray body, and curled black tail feathers. Female: look for orange bill marked with black.
Size: 22 – 23 in.
Sounds: Male: yeeb; a low kwek; female, a boisterous quacking. Males make a rattling noise by rubbing the bill against the flight feathers in a special display that resembles stylized preening; this display is given toward a mate and presumably helps maintain the pair bond (listen to this bird here).
Behavior: Mallards are dabbling ducks that tip up to feed. In urban settings, because of constant feedings by park visitors, they can become very tame and approachable. In more natural settings and where Mallards are heavily hunted, they can be very wary of approaching people.
Habitat: Mallards can be found in almost any wetland habitats. Marshes, wooded swamps, ponds, lakes, rivers, reservoirs, bays, city parks, farms, and estuaries. They also occur in prairie potholes and ephemeral wetlands; they may be found feeding along roadside ditches, pastures, grain fields.
Diet: Generalist foragers—seeds, vegetation and aquatic vegetation, aquatic insects and larvae, earthworms, snails and freshwater shrimp; agricultural seed and grain; grasshoppers, fish eggs, small fish
How to attract: Place nest boxes in appropriate habitats (find plans and placement information for a nesting box here)
Fun Facts
Ducks are strong fliers; migrating flocks of Mallards have been estimated traveling at 55 miles per hour.
Mallards, like other ducks, shed all their flight feathers at the end of the breeding season and are flightless for 3–4 weeks. They are secretive during this vulnerable time, and their body feathers molt into a concealing “eclipse” plumage that can make them hard to identify.
The Mallard is the ancestor of all domestic duck breeds, except the Muscovy Duck.
Facts provided by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Information compiled from multiple sources.