DE PERE (NBC 26) — The other day, Freddy Moyano caught something on camera he’d never seen in his life.
“I was just by chance filming comorants," he said. "I just kind of happened to turn, and I said, 'Wow, these guys are like, congregated right there,' and I kind of caught them. 'Are they cormorants? No, they're mallards. Wow. And they're diving. Wow. And what are they coming out with like, one after the other with food and everything? This is huge.'”
The wildlife videographer filmed the mallards eating zebra mussels in awe.
“Mallards, I mean, get out of here," he said. "Mallards diving is an adaptation of the species into the environment right here “
The invasive zebra mussels species came to Wisconsin’s waters in the late 1980s, according to the Wisconsin DNR, most likely on cargo ships from Europe and Asia.
“With a thing like zebra mussels, so long as the water depth is shallow enough that they can get it into an unlimited food resource, they'll take advantage of it," said Taylor Finger, Migratory Game Bird Specialist with the DNR. "So it's one of those ones where they're not too picky about what they get. And there's a lot of zebra mussels, so it's not ideal for them, but they'll take it.”
Zebra mussels displace native species and disrupt ecosystems; they interfere with boating and fishing, the DNR says. With this knowledge, Moyano saw the mallards eating them and thought that this must be a good thing.
“Them eating those zebra mussels, you know, helping cleaning up the rivers," said Moyano. "It's like the bottom feeders like your fish tank, right?”
But Finger says we can't get too excited because the population of the bottom feeders is still exploding in the state.
“There's more biomass in zebra mussels than any ducks will ever have any impact on," he said.
Even if the ducks can’t rid Wisconsin of zebra mussels forever, there’s so much to appreciate about the birds in our backyards, said Moyano.
“If you think this area is kind of dead in the winter? Not so," he said. "You can see so much wildlife out, doing things you can see the bald eagles coming from the shore back there fishing and leaving it's just a matter of opening the eyes.”
