The short version
For a century, farm-raised mallards have been turned loose along the Atlantic coast for hunting. They bred with wild birds. Today biologists find farm genes in nearly every eastern greenhead, and the eastern breeding population keeps sliding.
Keep Ducks Wild raises funds to protect the wild mallard. We advocate for higher standards on the release of farm-raised mallards, protect and restore the wetlands wild ducks depend on, support the genetic research that tracks their future, and create opportunities for new hunters to pursue truly wild birds.
of Atlantic Flyway mallards sampled carried a substantial amount of game-farm DNA.
Lavretsky, Ducks UnlimitedEastern mallards in 2026 compared with their 1998–2025 average.
USFWS, 2026game-farm mallards are still released each year in eastern North America.
Kucia et al.game-farm or hybrid hens needed to raise as many ducklings as one wild hen.
Lavretsky, via Field & StreamDonate to the cause
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Two homes, one bird
Wild mallards evolved in the prairie potholes and the forests and beaver ponds of eastern Canada, where hens nest on dry ground near water, then lead broods to cover. Those birds carry generations of instinct for timing, migration and survival.
Down the Atlantic Flyway, from New England marshes to Lowcountry cypress swamps, released farm birds mix with wild ones. Hybrids tend to wander rather than migrate, and they produce fewer young that survive.
Learn more
The Ducks Unlimited Podcast walks through how Dr. Phil Lavretsky first spotted a mysterious genetic signature in eastern mallards.
Listen ResearchMuseum specimens from 1860–1915 show no farm DNA. Modern eastern mallards are loaded with it.
Read the research Case storyHow a 2006 law still lets some shooting preserves release pen-raised mallards in our state.
Read the storiesWear the message
Bumper stickers, tees and more. Every one starts a conversation at the boat ramp.
Shop all gearEast Coast status report, November 2026
Mallards were never native to most of the East in big numbers. They were stocked here. Now the stocked bloodline may be part of why they’re disappearing.
Before the mid-1900s, the Atlantic Flyway belonged to the American black duck. Starting around 1920, roughly half a million game-farm mallards a year were released along the Atlantic coast, mostly from domestic Old World lines. Mallard numbers boomed, and by the 1960s the greenhead was the most common duck in the flyway.
Eastern breeding mallards peaked in the mid-1990s at about 1.4 million birds, then began falling about 1% a year. The steepest drop is in the northeastern U.S., where breeding mallards fell 39% between 1998 and 2023.
Millions of breeding birds, eastern Canada plus the northeastern U.S. (Virginia to New Hampshire)
Sources: Pennsylvania Game Commission (mid-1990s peak, 2019), West Virginia DNR (2022), Ducks Unlimited (2024), Delta Waterfowl (2025), USFWS Waterfowl Population Status, 2026. The 2026 report uses an updated model; under it, 2025 was 908,000 and the 1998–2025 average is about 1.19 million, so the last bar isn’t a perfect like-for-like comparison with earlier years.
The farm-duck connection
Game-farm mallards descend from Eurasian ducks domesticated over hundreds of generations. They look like wild greenheads, but genetically they differ from North American wild mallards by about as much as two separate species. Researchers compare it to the gap between a husky and a wolf.
When museum mallards collected between 1860 and 1915 were tested, none carried farm DNA. Today, the eastern population is best described as a hybrid swarm of wild and game-farm birds, while mallards out West remain genetically wild.
Share of sampled mallards with game-farm ancestry
Sources: Lavretsky (Atlantic Flyway), Kucia et al. (northwest Ohio and lower Mississippi Flyway), Outdoor Life reporting on DuckDNA (Central Flyway). Different studies used different samples and methods.
The pattern is hard to ignore. The places where farm mallards have been released in the largest numbers, the Atlantic Flyway and now the Great Lakes, are where mallard populations are dropping. Western mallards, with little farm ancestry, have held up better.
Honesty matters here. State wildlife agencies say no single cause of the eastern decline has been rigorously proven. Habitat loss, nest success, duckling survival and harvest are all being studied alongside hybridization, including a Ducks Unlimited-led telemetry project tracking GPS-tagged hens and their broods. We think the genetic evidence is strong enough to act on now.
Tighter state rules on free-flying releases of captive-reared mallards, especially near wild breeding areas.
Clear marking and reporting for every captive bird that is released.
Continued funding for genetic monitoring, such as the hunter-sample DuckDNA program.
Hunters and landowners choosing wild-bird habitat work over put-and-take ducks.
Straight from the scientists studying the eastern mallard. Every link opens the original source.
Real places, real decisions, and what they did to the ducks.
South Carolina law lets shooting preserve operators who held a license to release pen-raised mallards as of December 31, 2005 keep doing it. The privilege ends only when that operator stops releasing. Bills in 2019 and 2021 proposed a permit system for regulated mallard shooting areas with marking and reporting rules, but the 2021 version was referred to committee.
Sources: S.C. Code §50-11-1260; S.477 (2019–2020); S.371 (2021–2022)
In sampling of nearly 1,000 Atlantic Flyway mallards, researchers found only about 2% were genetically wild. Some states, including Rhode Island, Connecticut and New Jersey, produced almost no wild birds in the study at all.
Source: Field & Stream, reporting on Lavretsky lab research
With northeastern breeding mallards down about 20% since 1998, federal regulators cut the Atlantic Flyway mallard limit to two birds, only one a hen, for the 2019–20 season. Limits later loosened, and a newly adopted eastern mallard harvest strategy sets a three-mallard limit with no hen restriction for 2027–28.
Sources: Realtree, Delta Waterfowl, Ducks Unlimited 2026 survey summary
A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service review of captive-reared mallard rules on shooting preserves flagged three risks from free-flying releases: disease spread to wild birds, genetic mixing, and biased population surveys that can throw off how hunting regulations are set.
Source: Federal Register, August 26, 2003
In hunter-harvested mallards from northwest Ohio, only about a third were purely wild; the rest were recent hybrids or part of a hybrid swarm. Further south in the Mississippi Flyway, the rate was closer to 4%. The Great Lakes breeding population has fallen by more than 40% since 2000.
Sources: Kucia et al.; Luukkonen et al., Journal of Wildlife Management, 2025
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