Glenda Pearson wrote:
>"Also there as of last week, were four big very black ducks with
>irridescent green heads, curled tail feathers like a mallard,
>ivorish-bluish-pale yellow DUCK-shaped beaks, no protuberances around the
>bill such as a scoter would have, and none of the strange apparatus found
>on Moscovies. I suppose that these are some sort of dumped or escaped
>domestic/exotics; anyone care to speculate? They showed up all of a
>sudden, together, and, in fact, I have not been able to spot them this
>week (but I haven't stopped to look the last few days)."

These ducks are Mallards, one of the many ways the domestic breeding of
Mallards has manifested itself. They are amazing birds, and some of them
are entirely iridescent green-black, hard to understand how you could get
such a bird from a Mallard. The curled uppertail coverts are, I think,
always diagnostic of a male Mallard (athough they appear in some of the
hybrids between Mallards and other species too). Some of these shiny black
Mallards are just the size of wild Mallards, and a hunter informed me this
winter that he shot one out of a flock of similar birds that flew by him on
Willapa Bay! I am still trying to see if I can get it from his freezer to
make sure that's what he has.

Dennis Paulson, Univ. of Puget Sound