re: what do the ducks eat where you hunt?

Lead






:pagingdayflower:

The ducks where I hunt eat milo, wheat, and sometimes corn. (Not often because it's easy to see from the air.)

Basically whatever I feed with.

Most of the ones I kill eat at the cess ponds that feed into that strawberry field on finks hideaway.

I kill em when they fly south to 15.

They taste good.

In fact, I checked the ponds by osterland the other day and it was wrapped up with mallards. Must have been 300 plus.

Rice

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Someone told me once to pour sand or small gravel around and in a pond you hunt.

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Sounds illegal and the success rate is undetermined. I'd stick with the corn. 100% guaranteed to have ducks.

Rice

The initial question recognizes that not only do different species eat different things, but a particular species eats different things in different places.

To address the question, "do ducks eat marsh grass", the answer is some do. Gadwalls and wigeon regularly eat the stems and leaves of submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) like wigeongrass, southern naiad, sago pondweed, water milfoil, etc. Many species, like teal, pintails, and mallards eat the seeds produced by sago pondweed and wigeongrass, and mallards, pintails, redheads, canvasbacks, ring-necks and other species eat the rhizomes of those SAV species as well. Early in the season, when duck are heavily molting feather, SAV beds provide habitat for snails and other invertebrate foods that provide high-protien sources for molting birds.

But is "grass" necessary to support any birds at all in the marsh? No. Seeds and invertebrate foods can be found in the marsh substrate without a visible SAV component. Late-season gadwalls often eat algae in ponds that appear to have no grass or even algal mats.

When you account for the complex of habitat types a highly mobile species like ducks can include in their daily routine, the array of diet items can be pretty large. Where I hunt in SW Louisiana marsh maybe 7 or 8 miles from the rice-growing region, I've had weekends where some bluewings were full of rice, others had nothing but flatsedge seeds (Cyperus sp. that grow on marsh soils where summer drawdown stimulates germination/growth and then flood in fall and winter making those seeds available), and a couple had mixes of small seeds, snails, insect larvae and buds of some kind. So I hunt in an area where any variety of agricultural foods, SAV, and moist-soil seeds. Largely, I kill green and blue-winged teal, gadwall, and shovelers, with a smattering of other species, and I see a diverse mix of food items in the bird I clean. Most common foods are probably seeds of a variety of emergent marsh plants (millet, flatsedge, pigweed), SAV (wigeongrass and pondweeds), and fallow-ag and pasture seeds (grasses and upland weeds).

In evaluation of food available in ag field habitats for both the Gulf Coast and Lower Mississippi Valley Joint Ventures, I've been surprised at a couple of things. First, seed-producing annuals (moist-soil and weeds) provide a large proportion of the duck food in those habitats. Waste grain isn't the only food available, by a long ways, and the amount of waste grain has declined by over 60% in the last 10 years. Also, I was surprised at the importance of acorns in duck (mostly mallards) using LA/AR/MS habitats. Only in years of both banner acorn crops and lots of flooding along the major river systems are acorns a big portion of mallard diets. In all year, waste grain and moist-soil seeds are important food sources.

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waste grain has declined by over 60% in the last 10 years.

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And I hope that number continues to rise.

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Sunflower seeds show up a lot less from the air....I heard.

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You marsh guys should look into this