Puddlers taste better than divers huh????????

This should put an end to the puddle ducks taste better than diving ducks debate.

they’re prolly just sucking the algae off em and letting em go…

neat pics, i never knew that mallards ate fish.

My fatherinlaw’s brother works for the fishery in Lake City and just last week they found some dead ducks and were wondering if it was from eating dead shad with too many contaminates. They say the shad dieoff is unusually high this year.

Mallards always eat shad this time of year when there isnt much food around…….We have shot mallards late in the year before with shad in there crop….

hmmmmm…. someone dosent know ducks very good. there is a difference. only time i have ever seen ducks eating shad, is VERY late in the year. the shad die, and float down the river, and the ducks eat them. probably 90 percnt of the rest of they year, they eat grain, or vegetation. divers on the other hand, mainly eat vegetation and some snails and whatnot. mergansers are the ones that are the fish eaters, they specifially target fish year round, why do you think cans were almost market hunted to death? because they taste good.

i believe mallards are oppurtunistic feeders. i have shot them with zebra mussles in their crop as well. whatever is available

if i could bet any money, i would guess that is a hen mallard. the bill on a black is either yellow for a drake or green for a hel. never seen a black duck with a black bill. i think it is just the quality of the photo

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The first picture sure looks like a black duck. I dont see any white on the trailing edge of the wing and the bill is awful dark. That can happen with hens but not often.

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Not a black mallard

I’ve shot a few mallards in maple springs that were feeding on the zebra muscle’s. Boy did they stink