Mallards – An International (and One Tough) Duck
"Plastic" nature being what it is, we never see the "true" old, "native American fauna" as it was seen by our grandparents or greatgrandparents.
What we see around us, give or take the overabundant species that we always knew was a menace (English Sparrows, ragweed) is what we think has always been around. Perhaps not so abundant as we think it once was. But to us, we think it has always been there.
That most common of ducks, the Mallard (Anas rubripes) once was not so common in Massachusetts. In fact the Mallard wasn't even around 100 years ago. The Wood Duck (Aix sponsa) and the Black Duck (Anas obscura) were more common, the latter more common than the former by 1900. By 1905, when Edward Forbush (the state ornithologist then) wrote his "Useful Birds and Their Protection" he noted that the Wood Duck was disappearing. For this most beautiful of ducks, the male with its streaked hood and female's strange, rustic voice, was the most common of nesting ducks on the shores and banks of ponds and streams before 1900, here. As Forbush relates, the bird was not a shy animal (though neither is the Mallard, for that matter) but apparently, the Wood Duck was suicidal in its friendliness toward men.
Protected by "state statute" even in 1905, Forbush stated that only "the most rigid enforcement of the law" could save them. But people apparently, as he put it, kept on "gunning" them. Everyone considered it a basic American freedom then to heft firearm, point in face of small, not-shy duck, and then pull trigger. (In earlier articles, I digressed on those macho-man, pre-Bambi Syndrome days.) Then there was egg hunting, a popular past-time for kids way before the Nintendo revolution. The female Wood Duck often carried young from elevated nests (they sometimes reared young in hollow trees) and introduced them to the water this way, on their backs. Still in the state, with a widespread range, they are all but hidden in tiny populations that might be thicker in more remote spots. We see them no more on the North Shore.
So these were your main year-rounders amongst the duck clans here, once upon a time. The Black Duck is still seen in abundance. I have seen them on the coast more than inland, in the old haunts where I'd see them blended in fairly plentifully with Mallards.
Forbush noted the Mallard's rise in the 1920s here. They had been around in the far west of the state as far back as the 1870s, but in small numbers. Park and game commissioners saw fit to establish colorful game bird breeding programs sometime after the noticeable absence of the lovely Wood Duck. But Mallard's spread east was not due to game bird hungry breeders alone. These birds were making an entrance here from the central part of the U.S. to the east for quite some time. In 50 years, from 1900 to 1950, the bird expanded its range by 300 miles. Ring Necked Ducks (Aythya collaris) and the American Widgeon (Anas americanus) are similar westerners, come east.
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