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2 Different Water Birds in the Northwestern United States, Idaho on 4/30/21 (1 Viewer)

Procreus

Active member
United States
Hello! I just recently went birding in a local town and ran into 2 different water birds I'm unable to identify. I apologize beforehand for the quality of the pictures, as I only had my phone on me at the time.

The first 2 I have a few pictures of, and they look like they might be different colored mallards, but I don't know enough about them to say for sure. They have brown bodies with black heads, and the front of their neck/top of chest was white. They also had a yellow bill similar to mallards in the area. They were just swimming around and cleaning themselves in the water. These ones instantly reminded me of mallards due to the coloring of their bills.

The second 2 are going to be harder due to my poor image quality through my binoculars. However, the one on the left had a medium-brown body with patches of a light cream color, and a solid brown head. The one on the right was the opposite of the left, with most of the body color being a light cream color with patches of brown sewn in, and a solid cream colored head. Both of them had black bills. These ones were sitting on a piece of land in the middle of the pond and were cleaning themselves for a good 5-10 minutes before I moved on. These ones seemed similar to Gadwalls due to the "softness" of the feathers on their heads.

I'm brand new to birds and have heard people talking about mallards being different colors than the regular green heads/yellow bills/grey and brown bodies, but I don't know what different colors are possible for them as all I've seen are the common colored ones (for my area at least). Any information is greatly appreciated and thank you for taking a look!

-Brandon
 

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The first two are male Mallards with domestic blood. The second two are probably both domestic Mallards but I can't be sure from the photo.
 
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1-3. Domestic ducks, i.e. selectively-bred mallards, with no other species involved - hence, not hybrids.
4. Probably ditto, but can't see them well enough.
 
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