any one seen a duck like this before?!

[waterfowler3133]

just wondering if this might be some sort of cross breed or what i was out takein pictures one day and got one of this guy.  kinda weird yet cool at the same time i wish i could get this guy to mount him!

P.S. ignore the date still havent taken that darn wrong time stamp off yet

[Sarge]

Looks like a badly repainted Decoy   

Jeff

[Jordanlybeck]

Mallard X Baikal??? or maybe a Mallard X Gadwall??

[EastonWest]

picture is fuzzy but i'd have to say a drake mallard coming out of eclipse plumage. the head is usually the last part of the bird to get fully colored which is probably the cause for the mottled head.

[waterfowler3133]

well i would agree with the eclipse but it took this pick last week...ive never seen a drake take that long myself...but im not saying it isnt possiable...

[alan webfoot]

looks like a green shade on breast also mallards come in late sometimes BUT I wont say never ,I've never seen one come into dark green plumage like that one ,[patches] off white or tan usually they go from a ash colored grey black to wee spots of green then bam there they are

[Pat Bradburn]

I am going to say i would guess it to be a Brewer's Duck (Gadwall x Mallard). I've mounted a couple and they seem to have a pattern to the head feathers like the one in your picture. That picture is fuzzy, so its hard to tell, but I would shoot it before an adult drake (full colored) mallard coming into the decoys just because it looks like a Brewer's to me. Then I might be wrong. Can't tell until its slowed down a lot and closer  .

[byrdman]

brewers X2

[Nancy C]

I think it's a mallard that didn't moult at the proper time for whatever reason. Maybe it was injured and had to allocate its resources to healing up first?
The fact that so much of the speculum is showing on a swimming bird indicates that most of the sidepocket feathers are missing, and that suggests that it is in the middle of an extremely heavy moult. (Or maybe that something almost got itself a mallard meal!)
I have had birds that had to moult out of season for various reasons and those moults don't seem to be as orderly as usual. It's more like a case of "Drop everything, STAT!"
I have also seen them stop abruptly in the middle of moulting and that makes them look really weird. The feathers that have already been dropped finish growing in as usual, but they are mixed with old ones from the previous season.
Because the season is already so late I suspect that that duck may stop its moult and end up temporarily being one of those weird splotchy ones. If it lives long enough it will be back to normal by next fall.

[waterfowler3133]

yeah whatever he is its one cool looking bird to me!  i had never seen anything like it before.

[Cripplecreek]

We shot some birds in late December last year that looked similar.  They ended up being released birds.  They had been toe-clipped. 

[waterfowler3133]

toe-clipped?? is that like banding or something?  ive never heard of this... knowing me im prolly missing out on something?

[EastonWest]

toe-clipped is what breeders do to young "wild" type domestic waterfowl such as wood ducks, mallards, pintails, etc... that are being raised in captivity. at a young age, the bird's hind toe is clipped off as a means to identify this bird as a domestic bird and not a wild one.  sometimes these captive birds escape and you can usually tell if it's pen raised if it has one of it's hind toes clipped off.

[John C]

Fed. regs one of the ways of marking domestic raised waterfowl is clipping the right rear toe. If you are buying and selling waterfowl I would recommend buying from growers that toe clip.

[waterfowler3133]

hmmm learn something new every day huh?  well thanks for that little tid bit.  thats something useful ill have to remember.