Garganey/Mallard cross?

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 I have only just discovered this site and so only now ask a question
that arose two years ago. 
 On several occasions over two or three days we watched a male Garganey
and a female Mallard making up to each other in the garden not far from the
house. And very comic it looked
too! Later, we saw that the Mallard was
sitting on a nest just below an upstairs window (built on the framework
surrounding an oil tank which has thick growth around it for camouflage). We watched the Mallard daily and she was
seldom away from the nest as we saw her sit there through rain and storm. We didn't see the Garganey again. Eventually (after around 3 weeks) she
abandoned the nest without any sign of young and on inspection of the nest I
found one distorted egg with a soft shell. 
 The question is &ndash; can the different duck breeds mate successfully with
each other? Do they often try to?

Colin Wilkinson · Accepted Answer

Many ducks do cross quite readily in the wild, perhaps if a randy male has none of his own kind nearby. Where the young are viable they can produce some real brainteaser ID challenges. Some of the most commonly-met hybrids include pochard x tufted duck, scaup x tufted duck, and so on. On our local reservoir we once had something we suspected of being a hybrid hooded merganser x goldeneye (we called it the 'mergeye'), a mating which surely happened in captivity. 
 I've never heard of a garganey x mallard cross so this is intriguing. I would be very surprised though if a male garganey (our smallest duck) could mate successfully with a female mallard (our largest) for a host of very practical reasons. It sounds like the clutch was infertile so perhaps the task was indeed beyond the garganey! 
 Cheers 
 Colin