Oh, I should show you guys the exciting duck I saw!

On Christmas Eve, I went to meet my parents at a pub. Before going in, I took a moment to look at the birds on the pond outside.

One bird, swimming towards me, caught my eye. Its colouring puzzled me; it felt unfamiliar. I couldn't work out what it was from this distance.

As it got closer, I exclaimed aloud, involuntarily, 'Oh, what a beautiful duck!'


The exciting duck is the one on the right! It was clearly a female mallard, but I'd never seen a mallard like this before. Their feathers are usually a duller, darker brown, and they don't have those large white patches. You can see an ordinary female mallard in the upper right of this photo I took of a couple of Mandarin ducks:


Mandarin ducks are also pretty exciting, of course! The prettiest duck. But I was fascinated by this bright mallard; they're such familiar birds to me, but I had no idea they could look like this.

I whipped out my phone to see if I could find out anything about light brown mallards. Apparently it's called a blonde or leucistic mallard, and the colouring is due to genetic loss of pigmentation! Blonde mallards seem to be very rare, although I can't find any reliable information on exactly how rare; the Internet has turned up numbers ranging from one in 30,000 to the extremely implausible-sounding one in 165,000.

Regardless of the exact probability of seeing a blonde mallard, I'm very glad I was lucky enough to see one; she's so pretty!


Bonus birds: a couple of swans came right up to me, demanding to know why I was photographing a common duck and not them. I was so captivated by my mallard that I failed to photograph the swans when they were up close, but I did manage to get the moment they turned and departed in disgust. (The closer of the swans is in its awkward teenage stage, which is why its colouring is so patchy.)