Solid White Female Mallard (Not Peking I think) East TN (1 Viewer)

Hey folks,

I found a solid white female mallard today with what seemed like a wild mallard drake. I don't think this female is a peking, due mainly to the size which was relatively small, of course I could be mistaken. Furthermore, this female duck seems to be of breeding age, because it and the mallard drake were inseparable and often off by themselves. This female duck could be a hybrid of a domestic peking perhaps, but if so wouldn't it likely have at least some of the brown coloration seen in wild female mallards? Has anyone ever seen a breeding age, white female mallard? Please see the attached photos. The location was a river in east TN close to a public park, where domestic ducks, like muscovies, and wild ducks intermingle. In this park, the wild birds usually congregate separately from the domestics because they are more leery but they do sometimes integrate briefly.

Thanks,

Yep, white domesticated Mallards come in both sexes; look at any duck farm

Several white breeds are available, which vary in size.

I suspect that the whiteness of white domestic ducks is probably the result of a single mutant gene. This gene can probably also occur spontaneously in wild Mallards (in which case it would be classed as a form of leucism), or another possibility (which I suspect is the likely origin of birds that are "wild-type" in structure but have "domestic" colour patterns) is that the gene was introduced to the wild population by an escaped domestic bird that was several generations previous to this bird, so that the "domestic" structural traits have been "bred out", but the "white" gene has remained in the mix so that occasional white birds appear, betraying their domestic ancestry. (I have seen broods of wild Mallard ducklings containing a mixture of "normal-looking" and all-yellow ones - I assume the all-yellow ones would grow up to be birds like this...)

Thanks to both of you for the reply. Very interested scenarios you lay-out there stevethehydra. So would you agree that this bird has a wild phenotype. Nutcracker suggests that this body structure could be normal for a white domesticated female mallard.

Here's a white drake Mallard which I encountered at one of the local parks some years ago and which I've always suspected was a leucistic "wild" bird rather than a feral domesticate.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/fugl/405277939/in/album-72157602221544709/