A brood of 10day old Mallard ducklings on a Scottish village pond. SCO 8251
"Mallard" is derived from the Old French malart or mallart "wild drake", although its ultimate derivation is unclear. It may be related to an Old High German masculine proper name Madelhart, clues lying in the alternate English forms "maudelard" or "mawdelard". Mallards frequently interbreed with their closest relatives in the genus Anas, such as the American Black Duck, and also with species more distantly related, for example the Northern Pintail, leading to various hybrids that may be fully fertile. This is quite unusual among different species, and apparently is because the Mallard evolved very rapidly and recently, during the Late Pleistocene. The distinct lineages of this radiation are usually kept separate due to non-overlapping ranges and behavioural cues, but are still not fully genetically incompatible.[citation needed] Mallards and their domesticated conspecifics are, of course, also fully interfertile. Mallards appear to be closer to their Indo-Pacific relatives than to their American ones judging from biogeography. Mallard bones rather abruptly appear in food remains of ancient humans and other deposits of fossil bones in Europe, without a good candidate for a local predecessor species. The large ice age paleosubspecies which made up at least the European and west Asian populations during the Pleistocene has been named Anas platyrhynchos palaeoboschas.
Size: 5796px × 4223px
Location: Local Pond, Grantown on Spey. Highland Region. Scotland. United Kingdom.
Photo credit: © David Gowans / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No
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