16 
ANAS BOSCHAS 
must say that I believe the spring route is different from the autumn route in several of the western 
breeding species that come to our east coast. A number of wild Mallards which were trapped for me 
at Avery Isle, Louisiana, were liberated at Wenham, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1917, and 
these w'ere shot all the way down the coast, the following autumn, to near their former station in 
Louisiana, and finally two were taken, back at their breeding ground in North Dakota and .\lberta. 
Mallards tagged by Jack Miner in Kingsville, Ontario, did not apparently go to the Atlantic coast, 
as one would expect, but were shot at Ravenswood, West Virginia; Greenwood, Ohio; Martha, 
Tennessee; two in Kentucky; one in Bakersville, Missouri, and one in Indiana, besides one in Guey- 
dan, Louisiana. I do not know the dates of these records. Many Mallards banded at Port Perry, 
Ontario, north of Lake Ontario, in early autunm flew down the Ohio and Mississippi valleys to the 
Gulf coast, and also across to the Atlantic coast, where they were taken from Virginia to Florida. 
Others trapped in Louisiana and released at Ithaca, New York, showed the same tendency that my 
own did, namely, to return to Louisiana and later to a northwestern breeding area. They could 
not be lured away from their original migration route simply by transportation. This fact is of 
some importance in any attempt to introduce Mallards. 
In the last year or two a very large number of Mallards have been banded near Brovming, Illinois, 
on the Sanganois Club grounds and also at Cuivre Isle, near Peruque, Missouri (U.S.B.S. records). 
Many hundreds of these birds have already been shot, most of them the first year after banding, and 
these will eventually tell an interesting story. For instance we will know the exact breeding ground of 
certain groups, their east and west dispersal, their winter quarters, the length of time spent in 
migrating and the per cent of artificial mortality they are subjected to en route. One can already see 
that these ducks tend to tarry for a long time in the upper Mississippi Valley before seeking the 
Gulf coast, that they follow a well-defined route from southern Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the 
Dakotas to southern Louisiana and Mississippi, and that in places twenty per cent are shot before 
they get far away from the trapping station. 
Out of 72 adults banded at Bear River, Utah, in September, 1914-15 and 1916, there were 22 
returns (Wetmore, MS.). These extend as far west as central California and as far east as Texas, 
southeastern Idaho and other points. 
Now as to dates of migration there is nothing very unusual about the Mallard. It is not an early 
autumn migrant, being well behind the Pintail, Shoveller and Blue-winged Teal, but on the way 
north it takes advantage of every bit of open water and arrives wdth the first ducks pushing up 
the Mississippi Valley. During autumn the species straggles very rarely to Newfoundland (J. and 
J. M. Macoun, 1909) and there are a few records for Labrador, namely, Davis Inlet and the mouth 
of the Koksoak, and Fort Chimo (Packard, 1891) and Okak (Hantzsch, 1908). 
Enumeration of dates of arrival and departure would be tedious, and they are well summed up by 
Cooke (1906). The northern States are reached in the second half of September. The birds become 
plentiful two or three weeks later and stay until frozen out. They reach Texas and the southern 
States in the first half of October, but increase in numbers for a month at least. Mcllhenny (1916) 
mentions a specimen, which, transported in winter from the Gulf coast of Louisiana to Wisconsin, 
was tagged there and the very next winter w’as taken at the same place in Louisiana. Those Mallards 
breeding in .\laska and on the North Pacific coast probably do not, as individuals, move far to the 
south, on account of the more uniform winters, but great numbers visit the interior valleys of Cali- 
fornia, and the mouth of the Colorado River. The migration is of course somewhat later on the 
Pacific coast. A few stragglers, probably from the Alaskan peninsula or the Aleutian Islands, reach 
the Hawaiian Islands. 
In western Europe the Mallard tends to become almost sedentary : but northern-bred groups arrive 
in the winter to join the local birds. Of course much of the breeding stock has been extirpated, but 
originally there must have been stationary, or nearly stationary groups everywhere, with little terri- 
tory, except in the far north, that could be termed strictly a passage area. In general European Mai- 
