To become a top mallard duck hunter, you have to study and learn as much as you can about the mallard duck. You have to:
Without question the most common duck throughout North America is the mallard duck. Its range extends from Northern Canada and Alaska south into Mexico and from coast to coast. It is the bread-and-butter bird for many duck hunters regardless of the state, region or flyway they hunt.
The mallard duck's extensive distribution is the result of its uncanny ability to adapt to many types of wetland habitat. Whether you choose to hunt cattail marshes, rivers or streams, secluded backwaters, large open water, agricultural fields or flooded timber chances are their will be mallard ducks nearby.
The mallard ducks life-cycle is driven by its annual migration south in the fall and back north in the spring to breed and repopulate itself. As with any wild creature mallards need three things to survive: food, water and safety or adequate habitat.
Mallards are omnivores and depending upon the time of the year, food availability, weather conditions and energy requirements mallard ducks will eat a wide variety of aquatic plants and invertebrates as well as crops.
Late in the spring, throughout the summer and into the early fall mallards will typically eat small seeded water plants, grasses and invertebrates. These include duckweeds, smartweeds, grasses, sedges, pondweeds, rice-cutgrass, wild rice, arrowhead, wild and seeded millet, crustaceans, mosquito larvae, insects, small fish, tadpoles, fish eggs, small frogs, worms and spiders. Smartweed, wild rice and millet are late summer and early to mid fall favorites for the mallard duck.
As the temperature starts to fall and the energy needs for migration occur and fat storage requirements necessary for successful breeding increase, mallard ducks look for food sources that are high in protein and energy. These food sources include corn, rice, wheat, barley, sorghum, flooded soybeans, and acorns in bottomland hardwoods. Mallards will also continue to use millet as a food source especially during a mild fall or winter.
Flocks of mallards will often feed in the early morning and late afternoon in nearby harvested fields, returning to water after feeding.
Mallard ducks migrate along a number of well established migration routes but the greatest concentrations move from Manitoba and Saskatchewan through the Central and Mississippi Flyway of the United States. Weather is a key factor in determining the size and scope of the fall migration.
Among puddle ducks, mallards are one of the latest fall migrants. In fact, among dabbling ducks, the mallard duck has the most extended migration period. Their migration period begins in late summer and can extend into early winter. Once the migration is underway it is quite common to see large rafts of mallard ducks congregating together.
The further south mallards are hunted the more important the migration is to the overall success of the state or region. As the past few years have demonstrated, mallards will stay in Canada and the Northern United States until both their food and water sources are no longer available. Often times this means that snow cover must be present to move massive amounts of mallard ducks further south.
Although migration is a key to a mallard duck hunters success, research has shown that it is less important in some of the Great Lake states, Northeast states, Mid-Atlantic states, the Dakotas and the Pacific Northwest as the majority of mallards harvested in these states are "home grown".