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Black duck or mottled duck

2K views 9 replies 5 participants last post by  Pete-pec 
#1 ·
#4 ·
I see the difference of the darkness...but i've never shot a mottled duck this big and this dark though...and also the color of the feet has to do with the water. Ones we shoot it salt water areas have splotchy orange feet and ones in fresh water areas are solid bright orange.
 
#5 ·
looks like a stud mottled to me, and here is a couple more pics i found. its hard to tell but our blacks feet just arent a bright. could be different in other places depending on how far they fly and what they are living in i guess. these pics are not very good ones of there leg color, pretty deceiving with the color. seems like blacks got a reddish or purplish tint to the leg more that orange.


 
#10 ·
Well, there is so much hybridization amongst the mallard complex, that the bird certainly may not be "pure" anything. In my opinion, I would say black duck. The reason is the bill color versus the speculum, or feather darkness. I have a Florida mottled that I would call a black duck if I had shot it here in Wisconsin. I have shot perhaps 10 black ducks over the years here in Wisconsin, and a couple in Massachusetts. I would say that the two in Massachusetts were mutts. Both had a hint of green in the head. At three feet, you could not see the color, but it was certainly there. The blacks we have here in Wisconsin, are very black for the most part, but a few are lighter, and the hens are different colored as well. The deciding factor for me, is if there are at least 14 brown feathers on the underside of the wing near the wrist, where the leading edge is.

Many years ago, there was a study being conducted in New York, to do DNA sampling on black ducks, to determine if there is actually a species that is pure any longer? I'm not sure which came first, the mallard, the black, the Florida, or Gulf Coast mottled, the Mexican, or the Hawaiian, but I'm pretty sure, all of them are a derivative of a mallard? I never heard anything after the article, but I bet the samples were all over the place. On the East coast, there are so many mutts, that are combinations of black and mallard, that where the two species of mottled and blacks may meet (perhaps even this bird) would certainly screw one another, and you would again have even further hybridization? I know this problem happens where the mottled, Mexican, and Hawaiian ducks interbreed with common mallards.
 
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