Mallard Anas platyrhynchos
Common resident, passage migrant and winter visitor.
Mallards at Barton Pits March 3rd 2011 (Graham Catley).
Our commonest resident duck. In the late 1980s the Atlas put the breeding population at 7,500 pairs and the wintering population at 20,000 birds. Recent evidence suggests shooting interests release tens of thousands of Mallards a year in the county. Where they come from, how many are shot and their impact on the native population is not known. BBS data shows that during the period 1994-2018 the breeding population has fallen by 10%. This is consistent with APEP4, which adjusted suggests a population of 6,000 pairs in 2016. The current position of the wintering population is more concerning. Peak winter counts across the county in recent years reported in LBR suggest a winter population of some 4,000 birds a fall of 80% since the 1980s, compared with a fall of 33% for England reported by WeBS Online for the period 1992/93 to 2018/19. The reasons for this fall are not clear but one possibility is that birds from Russia and Scandinavia are wintering further east as the climate changes.
(Account as per new Birds of Lincolnshire (2021), included September 2022)