Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire A Handsome Halfbreed Indeed

While in school for wildlife degree we always referred to the mallard as the rape artist of the waterfowl world. Nothing they won't interbreed with given a chance.

The term is "leucistic". There's a sequence of genes and pigments that go into color formation, failure of the base gene for ALL colors results in a classic albino.

Failure of genes further down the sequence results in the formation of SOME color, in the right places, but not all. Case in point; zebra finches are a common cage bird...

Here's a normal male...



...and here's the very common (in captivity) "fawn" mutation...



In this case the normal grey color is a combination of two feather pigments, one of which is missing in the fawn examples.

Duck hybrids within the dabbling duck genus are usually pretty simple to identify, especially in males, and relatively common. Here's a mallard-pintail hybrid....



This freqency of hybrids due to the fact that the hens of all species look pretty much alike, and because male ducks commonly commit rape AKA "forcible copulation" since males generally outnumber females.

All the marking that are apparent in that pale mallard are in the right place for the species, albeit paler, also the bird appears to be about the same size and proportions as the others. IME mallard-domestic duck hybrids typically run bigger with different proportions than wild birds.

I have seen a wild white mallard just once, and it was spectacular. But in songbirds at least, full albinism often is accompanied by weaker flight feathers, rendering the bird flightless at some point. Actually partial albino and leucistic examples are more often seen in the wild than true albinos, maybe on account of that very factor.

Still, when them mallards are subject to the "peregrine test", guess which one the falcon picks? That and the fact that in ducks its the females that recognize their species, choosing the correct males. Unfortunately for him, that guy dont look like a mallard.

Birdwatcher