By Ronica Stromberg
Mallards may enter duck hunting season with a few strategies of their own.
Ethan Dittmer, a waterfowl scientist and Nebraska doctoral student, said his research this past year on the Southeast Kansas Mallard GPS project indicates the ducks are smart enough to hide from hunters.
“Mallards are incredibly capable of navigating the landscape with extreme hunting pressure safely,” he said. “What I mean by that is they don't often make random movements or flights. They know when to fly and where to go when it's safe.”
In his project’s first field season in southeast Kansas in fall and winter 2023, Dittmer observed ducks staying during the day on public lands and sanctuaries closed to hunting. At night, when waterfowl hunting was closed everywhere, the ducks moved to private hunting grounds to feed on more abundant food sources. In the morning, they returned to the safe spots.
Dittmer had hunted ducks in high school and had long suspected this waterfowl version of hide-and-seek. He had also observed such duck behavior in his master’s research in Arkansas and now sees it in his current research.
“It's probably my favorite aspect of the mallard waterfowl research I've done before is kind of the interplay of hunting with their behavior,” he said. “It's just really impressive to me just how smart they can be of navigating those landscapes.”
See more images and read the rest of the story at https://snr.unl.edu/gradstudent/spotlight/dittmer-ethan.aspx