Some dabbling ducks

Usage examples of mallards.

The conservationists were kicking up such a terrible stink about unshot mallards escaping into the wild.

Without the line of the shoals and islets, now that the mallards had flown, there was a solitude of water.

As he came round the islands he constantly met and disturbed parties of waterfowl, mallards, and coots.

He now saw (what had, indeed, been going on for some time) that there was a ceaseless stream of waterfowl, mallards, ducks, coots, moorhens, and lesser grebes coming towards him, swimming to the westward.

In the cloudless sky swallows and swifts were wheeling, and on the water half-a-dozen mallards moved aside to let him pass.

When the boat was loaded with oysters, its principal cargo, the captain could usually find space on deck for a few last-minute barrels crammed with ducks: mallards, redheads, canvas-backs and, the juiciest of all, the black.

The only indica­tion Jake caught that his partner was up to something came one dawn when he helped lift mallards and canvas-backs from Tim’s skiff.

The fens were a semitropical marsh area consisting mostly of thick chalma growth, weirwood forest, and more temperate stands of giant prometheus in the rocky areas above the floodplain, but during the crisp, dry cold snap of early autumn, the mallards paused there on their migration from the southern islands to their lakes in the remotest regions of the Pinion Plateau.

I asked them to quit talking so loudly as we approached the freshwater fens where the mallards would be setting in.

Besides, I'd learned from experience that most of these weekend hunters would position their floats so that they would be shooting at each other as soon as the first flight of mallards appeared.

One of them arched its neck and called just as the real mallards became visible above the tree line to the south.

A pair of mallards came up in the water, gabbling, begging for a crust of bread.

This would probably be the last occasion on which they would be allowed to use mallards, Shasa Courtney reflected.

Later in summer, the still water would turn green with algae, and the mallards waddled awkwardly out of it with brilliant green bellies.

In winter it would freeze over, by then the mallards had gone elsewhere and blue-grey pigeons tiptoed over the meagre ice, picking at whatever had fallen from the trees, flapping their wings furiously when the frozen water broke beneath their feet.