Mallard

Where does the mallard live?

Home: Ponds, rivers, lakes and city parks across the north.

In the wild it lives in these countries: Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, Poland, the United States, Canada, China.

Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.

The short profile

Fully grown: 50–65 cm long, wingspan 81–98 cm. It weighs about 1.1 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.

The story behind it

For most of the year the drake is unmistakable: bottle-green head, white collar, grey body. Then, around June, he vanishes — not the bird, the look. The green goes, the whole drake turns a drab brown, and for a while he is hard to tell from a female. This is called eclipse plumage, and in some duck species it lasts from one to three months. At the same time something else happens that no songbird would survive: the duck sheds all its flight feathers at once, instead of a few at a time, and cannot fly at all for a while. So the brightest bird on the pond becomes the plainest exactly when it is least able to get away. By autumn the new feathers are grown, the green head is back, and the drake looks like the picture in the book again.

Find it on the globe

Mallard is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.