WaterfowlForum.Net

SpinnerMan wrote:

Rick wrote:I'd imagine the same could likely be said of mottleds and black ducks. Matters not a lick to me, was just an odd duck.

Mottled and blacks are each separate species and not simply a regional variation in color of a mallard as the Mexican duck is.

That link I provided is pretty good place for these things. The first similar specie to Mallards listed is Black and the second is Mottled.

Suppose you do this to that "whatever duck". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIUiREAprV8
Bam, it's a mallard if all you got is a wing to look at.

The GW would call it a mallard I bet.

Well if you had 4 mallards and a mottled on your strap?

Ericdc wrote:Well if you had 4 mallards and a mottled on your strap?

That is a very large if for me until them high performance tiller (outlaw ooser) guys invite me to Louisiana.
Then it's possible I guess. Neat duck, cool pic. Had me going wtf there for a minute. Had to google it.

Figuring local agents would most likely see it as a mottled, I counted it as one of our legal three of those that morning and didn't try to trip another.

Rick wrote:Figuring local agents would most likely see it as a mottled, I counted it as one of our legal three of those that morning and didn't try to trip another.

Can't see well enough to tell a black from a hen mallard from a mottled until it's in my hand so I'm real careful about the brown ones. (I really like green)

Rick wrote:Figuring local agents would most likely see it as a mottled, I counted it as one of our legal three of those that morning and didn't try to trip another.

Yeah, that's the tricky part. I'd try to make sure they could count it as either a mottled or a mallard and it not matter.

However, legally I am pretty sure it is counted as a mallard.

Here's from Arizona where this color phase is more common.

http://www.azgfd.gov/h_f/documents/waterfowlregs.pdf

BAG LIMIT: The daily bag limit of ducks, including mergansers: Seven (7) per day not to include more than: two (2) redheads; two (2) pintails; seven (7) mallards, no more than two (2) of which may be female or Mexican-like ducks; three (3) scaup, and two (2) canvasback.

Of course, if I shot it up here it would be counted as a mallard/black hybrid. Solid white bars above and below, mallard. Now the question is other duck or mallard. Technically, I think hybrids are other ducks and only count to your total and not to any individual species. However, if ever that situation arises, I'm not going to press my luck.

This is a very long way from Arizona, and I can't imagine one of our guys deciding it was more mallard than mottled-like, whether he'd ever heard of a Mexican duck or not. Back in the point system days when true blacks were 100pts and mottleds were much less, the practical enforcement rule of thumb was that if it made it to our end of the flyway, it was considered a mottled.

Rick wrote:This is a very long way from Arizona, and I can't imagine one of our guys deciding it was more mallard than mottled-like, whether he'd ever heard of a Mexican duck or not. Back in the point system days when true blacks were 100pts and mottleds were much less, the practical enforcement rule of thumb was that if it made it to our end of the flyway, it was considered a mottled.

The solid double white bars, that is instantly mallard. Of course, that is because all we are worried about are mallards and blacks. Any doubt, look at the wing. Never seen a hybrid, which is where it gets complicated.

Mottled and blacks, I have no idea. They don't have that easy tell tell difference.

Around here we don't get a lot of blacks, so I'm not going to assume that the warden knows the difference. I would do the same down there and simply assume the warden could go either way and not want to get into an argument just so I can shoot one more duck at most.

SpinnerMan wrote:The solid double white bars, that is instantly mallard. Of course, that is because all we are worried about are mallards and blacks. Any doubt, look at the wing.

Bars or no, most hunters and hopefully agents here can tell hen mallards' general coloration from mottleds' (or nearly identical Mexicans') at a glance. (And wouldn't have to ponder the addition of a drake mottled/Mexican's yellow bill.) The two are so very different that it's never occurred to me to take a comparison photo, and I photograph everything:


But if one of our agents did get a wild hair to write you over a single questionable bird, he'd most likely be the one in trouble with the magistrate.

Spinner they we have hybrid ducks in Illinois. Gotta get below I-70 or I-64 and you'll kill one.

Rick wrote:But if one of our agents did get a wild hair to write you over a single questionable bird, he'd most likely be the one in trouble with the magistrate.

Yeah, not that way here. Of course, the DNR has been practically wiped out by the financial mismanagement of the state so the chance of actually running into a warden is practically zero, so it really doesn't matter if you shoot 20 ducks most places that are not run by the state

The reason I only hunt at clubs is because I just don't want to be harassed by the local LEOs. It's not about bird ID. I know guys that every year opening day they spend a good chunk of it being harassed by the LEO. They are legal, at least for now. The state recently decided to disregard the law and let the locals in one area ban hunting in their area. This is Illinois. They redrew the waterfowl zone boundaries for the benefit of some powerful people and screwed all the guys that hunted on the river in that area. The river, where most public duck hunting happens is best at the end of the season, but the rich guys wanted to hunt early on their flooded corn which is froze out by the end. So instead of the simple I-80 line, we now have this convoluted zone that is part of the north duck zone and the central goose zone, after all, the goose hunting doesn't get good until late so they want the best of both for them.

Never vote for anyone from Illinois, Republican or Democrat. This place is fucked. I just stay as far from the gray areas as I can until I can get out of this state.

That's my take. But either way citing someone for a single bird that was taken under less than clear cut circumstance was what past head of federal enforcement down here, Dave Hall, used to call "a skinny pinch" and discourage as doing more harm from a PR standpoint than good from a biological one. State guys have also been known just to confiscate what amounted to honest mistake birds. Perhaps we're just lucky to hunt a region where reason generally trumps the letter of the law.

Regardless, we do our best to insure mistakes are just that and greatly lessen the chances of it becoming an issue.

johnc wrote:Maybe I am way off base,but wouldn't a game warden go with the dominent characteristics of the bird,in this case nearly identical to a drake mottled excepts for the double white bars

And that probably has to do with where you are from. For me, the dominant characteristic was the double white bars. The instant I saw that I knew it was a mallard of some kind. A kind I had never heard of, so I did a quick search which showed it is a color phase of mallards just like there are black gray squirrels and various different color black bears.

Wrongo, Froggy. Or, at least, this source, http://txtbba.tamu.edu/species-accounts/mexican-duck/, differs:

Mexican Duck and other “Mallard-like” ducks whose male plumages resemble those of female, immature and eclipse male “typical” Mallards, have always raised intriguing taxonomic questions. A recent genetic study of dabbling ducks (Johnson and Sorenson 1999) shows the close relationship of Mottled (A. fulvigula) and American Black duck (A. rubripes) to the North American Mallard (A. platyrhynchos).

Mexican Duck was considered a separate species for almost a century, but is now treated as a subspecies of the “typical” Mallard because of extensive hybridization along the United States-Mexico border (Am. Ornithol. Union 1998). The status of other species, also closely related to Mallards, was left unchanged although they also hybridize widely with “typical” Mallards and can be difficult to sort out (Fedynich and Rhodes 1995). A study of plumage and morphological differences in Mexican Ducks across their range indicates a clinal variation from north to south with many areas where these ducks show no evidence of hybridization (Scott and Reynolds 1983). A recent genetic study (McCracken et al. 2001) suggests Mexican Ducks are most closely related to Mottled Ducks and these two are most closely related to American Black Ducks. These authors and others (Howell and Webb 1995) suggest Mexican Duck deserves full species status. A more detailed discussion of the taxonomy of Mexican Duck is presented in the Systematics section of Drilling et al. (2002).

Interesting, particularly "suggest Mexican Duck deserves full species status".

Texas considers them mottleds, even though Arizona still considers them mallards.

http://tpwd.texas.gov/regulations/outdoor-annual/hunting/migratory-game-bird-regulations/duck-limit

In Texas they call it a "dusky duck". Special rules.
Limit is one and you can't shoot them the first 5 days of the season.

Because there's some back and forth movement along the coast, our mottled limit took a hit from 3 to 1 when theirs did, though we've no similar "dusky" designation and haven't lost days, yet. At the time, I was among those put out by our being punished for another state's habitat destruction, but have now seen enough decline in my own area's mottled population to see more merit in the cut. Could well still be mottled strongholds where hunters could readily take more than one a day, but such opportunity is now rare here, and they're largely self regulating in that regard. Indeed, losing those first five days wouldn't have made much difference since 2012.

A couple years ago in Florida, I had one of those moments when the wife thinks you are nuts. First time I saw a Mottled duck. I was excited and I could tell my wife was thinking, we have them in every park back home.

Rick wrote:Because there's some back and forth movement along the coast, our mottled limit took a hit from 3 to 1 when theirs did, though we've no similar "dusky" designation and haven't lost days, yet. At the time, I was among those put out by our being punished for another state's habitat destruction, but have now seen enough decline in my own area's mottled population to see more merit in the cut. Could well still be mottled strongholds where hunters could readily take more than one a day, but such opportunity is now rare here, and they're largely self regulating in that regard. Indeed, losing those first five days wouldn't have made much difference since 2012.

And on my end of the state they're going strong with plenty seen on most every hunt in their usual puddles. Hope they make many more this offseason, maybe a few will head west.

Given my nerd scientist nature, I did a little more research and it is interesting.

Officially, the Mexican duck still seems to be a mallard (Anas platyrhynchos diazi), but there is definitely many in the field that think it should be a separate species (Anas diazi). It has never been a Mottled duck (Anas fulvigula).

http://avibase.bsc-eoc.org/species.jsp?lang=EN&avibaseid=42CF45FEA3D6D52F&sec=summary

However, mallard or separate species, it's a rare and cool bird.

My suspicion and this is just my paranoia that results from having lived in Chicagoland for too long is that there is a goal of making it a separate and threatened species since that would really fuck up duck hunting in that area. How many can ID a Mexican duck on the wing?

BTW, the reason for my paranoia. A bill was introduced in the IL legislature to extend the safety zone for shotguns from 100 yards to 1,000 yards, but only in Chicagoland. This would effectively ban all hunting in my area, which is of course the point.

I missed the part where anyone said it was a mottled duck, only that genetic testing shows it closest to mottleds which are closer blacks than mallards. Much ado over nothing, regardless. Most here would call it potroast and be done with it.