What do the mallards eat in your part of the world?

I've also found a few west side ducks eating seaweed and assorted attached creatures.
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The ducks here feed on eelgrass (Vallisneria neotropicalis), milfoil, Najas sp., coontail & other submerged grasses. But they ingest a pile of invertebrates with it. Almost all the ducks we kill, puddlers and divers, will have snails /snail shells in their crops & gizzards right along with the grasses.
We get sea lettuce in the Shoalgrass beds down on Mississippi Sound in the cold months and the redheads & greater scaup feed on it as well.
 

And they say Shovelors eat nasty things....
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The funny thing is that all the shovelors I have shot here tasted just as good as any teal or other puddle duck I've shot. But I've heard guys from other parts say they stink. All depends on where you are I guess.
 
I use to hunt off the Potomac River in Maryland and we had mallards that would come in from the east over the trees and I would always tell whoever was hunting with me NOT to shoot mallards coming in from the east. They would never listen and when the birds were retrieved I would tell them "that's a nice looking Dicky duck." They would of course ask what a Dicky duck was and I would say that on the other side of the trees to the east was a large hog farm where the sewage from the hog barns flowed down into a "pond". The place was owned by a guy named Dick Mattingly and if you smelled the chest of the duck you could tell if it was a "Dicky duck " or not. The stench was unbelievable. I guess these damn ducks would "bath" in the pond all the time. Nasty! can't say I didn't warn them.
 
I thought Mallards ate corn, beans, maybe a few bugs if they got too close...same sort of things that I see geese eat. I guess I was thinking "mildly omniverous" with a preference toward the veggie side of the plate.

Eating dead fish, roe or anything else like that is a surprise to me and I find it very interesting. The question itself was a good one, Mike. I generally breast out what I take and have never performed a necropsy to examine the little feller's food tubes.

Maybe I'll whip up some paper mache pork chops and float them out by the decoys... :)

(this is why I enjoy this forum so much...you can learn something every day.)
 
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Wow! I had no idea. No wonder the do so well in so many different places, they must be able to smell protein.

Very cool.

Mike
 
Dave,

I hunt the Potomac in MD from time to time. What part did you hunt?

On the lower Patuxent River in MD, there'e plenty of wild rice for them.
 
Larry, my blinds were in the MacIntosh Run area near Leonardtown. The Pawtuxent is good if you can find places to hunt it, the northern area Pax river gets hard to find boat launch access.
 
Mildly related to what mallards eat...

A few years ago at the office, I moved up our weekly department meeting because I was going duck hunting on the originally scheduled day. While mentioning my planned activity to the group, one lady immediately turned angry, saying "Duck hunting! My friends at the lake fed bread crumbs to some ducks all summer and then in the fall duck hunters killed them!" To which I said "Next year, please have your friends feed corn. It makes the ducks fatter."

Needless to say, she didn't stay for the meeting.
 
I shot a canada goose last year, that when turned into goose jerky, had a deffinate smoked salmon flavor to it. It wasn't so strong as to taste bad, but it was noticeable. Now I'm wondering if his last supper didn't include some salmon.
 
Mostly corn, acorns and natural veg like millets and celery etc. But, I have seen them on rivers specialize in eating shad that have been chopped up in dam turbines as well as shad that have been stunned in ice flows and frozen into the slush. I have also seen mallards pick at dead fish like bass and salmon and I've seen them feast on maggots on dead critters as well. In front of my Mom's, when the corn is covered with snow too deep to dry feed, the mallards dive right along side the bufflehead and GE's for zebra mussels.

As a side note I once witnessed a Herring Gull eat a used or otherwise discarded prophylactic(it was pink as I recall)on the lower harbor breakwall in Marquette harbor...popular night spot for the college crowd. A few days later I saw the same gull trying to poop out said object and it was stuck so when it flew around the rubber would flap in the wind. I ain't lying either...seen it with my own two eyes.
 
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are "connoisseurs"....eating only the very finest of fare.....

While "Chessies" remain "bottom"....or would that be "from the bottom" feeders....

Says something for the level of intelligence of the individual species doesn't it......



Steve
 
Mallards may come back for seconds on salmon...but Chessie's will come back for turds.

I guess mallards do as well since I too have seen them mining for nuggets in feedlot dung heaps.

I am curious about the month in which Eric saw the mallards feeding on dead fish down his way. I noticed the same salmon carcass feeding frenzy in AK as other guys but I always wondered if the salmon were available at other times of the year if mallards would feed on them then as well. Eric's story sounds like one of opportunity but maybe it's an early fall pre-migration protein loading strategy in AK.
 
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are "connoisseurs"....eating only the very finest of fare.....

While "Chessies" remain "bottom"....or would that be "from the bottom" feeders....

Says something for the level of intelligence of the individual species doesn't it......



Steve
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come on steve.... we all know that labs don't eat poop!!!!!! I know my CBR doesn't!
 
Mallards may come back for seconds on salmon...but Chessie's will come back for turds.

I guess mallards do as well since I too have seen them mining for nuggets in feedlot dung heaps.

I am curious about the month in which Eric saw the mallards feeding on dead fish down his way. I noticed the same salmon carcass feeding frenzy in AK as other guys but I always wondered if the salmon were available at other times of the year if mallards would feed on them then as well. Eric's story sounds like one of opportunity but maybe it's an early fall pre-migration protein loading strategy in AK.
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Lots of animals exploit seasonally or temporariily abundant protein sources that is way outside their normal food choices as protein is a limiting nutient in most herbivore diets. Deer, squirrels, chipmunks will eat a dead animal now and then. Scoter (not an herbivore), which typically eat bivalves (particularly mussels) switch to eat the roe of Pacific Herring annually when the roe is available annually. Not suprising that mallards stock up on salmon or shad protein when available. Protein loading is surely strategy pre-, or concurrent with, migration - there may be times of years that animals we consider herbivores are more prone to eat non-conventional protein sources, I haven't read that, but I wouldn't be surprised. Clint would know more, I'm sure.

T
 
Well, given that white-tailed deer are a major predator on songbird nests, and I had a jack rabbit that LOVED young pigeons, what we may consider the norm is often wrong. Think about it, YOU are considered a herbivore, but YOU find this nice chunk of protein YOU don't have to work to catch. ARE YOU going to say " naw, don't think I'll eat it because I'm a herbivore"?

Diets are a function of availability, abilaity to process, and the cost/benefit ratio of the food (i.e. choosing mid-sized mussels rather than the largest). Most feed to meed a ddaily energy requirement with a protein constraint.

Clint
 
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