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Tevyes Dad said:
This is normal across the board. Ducks with orange bills, blue bills and green bills all loose their pretty colors to darker browns and blacks as they lay eggs. I believe this is part hormonal and part nutritional and depends on bill color. Entie May 14th, 2014 hasn't laid any eggs yet (2 months ago she was an egg): Close to pristine. Entie July 29th, 2015 of last year laying like crazy - (the red is watermelon): Very dark and speckled. Entie January 11th, 2016 before she started laying again: Mostly clear still a little darker. As a point of illustration on another color bill (they don't freckle as much as orange bills) Here is Rhiannon on Aug 9, 2015 in full lay: (almost totally black bill) Here she is on December 3rd, 2015 she is on break (and got in a nice not-bleached-yet molt :D ) (you can see quite a bit of clean green in her bill.)
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That is so cool! I would have never thought that their bills changed color that often and for those reasons! Ducks are awesome :)
 
PotatoWaffles said:
That is so cool! I would have never thought that their bills changed color that often and for those reasons! Ducks are awesome
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Pretty wild!
 
PotatoWaffles said:
I agree. I like to be able to tell them all apart. I wish I could tell which mallard lady was Nachos and which one was Lloyd, lol,
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Tella and Ettie are very hard to tell apart. They are sisters from the same clutch and Rouens so they are just like your mallards but bigger. When we first got them Ettie had a white spot on her chest and Tella didn't and that was how we could tell one from the other. Since then, the white spot comes and goes and we found other things. Ettie typically has lighter face markings than Tella - but not always. Ettie's bill is slightly shorter than Tella's, but they are close enough, you can only tell if you are looking at both of them. We can absolutely identify them from their feet all the time because they have had different minor injuries on their feet that are positively identifiable. Last summer, we put a band on Ettie's leg so that we could identify her in poor lighting or from an angle that might not reveal who was who. I started "guessing" the duck after that then verifying with the band. I got where I could just identify the right duck over 95% - not by individual traits, but by the overall appearance - "this one just looks like Tella". A couple months ago, the band broke off. I am not sure how often I am wrong now, but I mostly think I know who I am looking at. We will re-band Ettie in the near future, but this exercise worked fairly well for me. Also when you can identify them visually, you will get to know their personalities. This also helps. If I seem them doing the dirty duck dance, Ettie is the one on top. If one walks up to me for no reason and inquisitively turns their head, it is Tella. If one starts quacking the alert alarm when I come in the yard, it is Ettie. Ettie is much higher in the pecking order than Tella so I can also tell sometimes by how other ducks treat them.
 

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