They lay about 10 eggs, which hatch in 26 days. Gadwall are most plentiful in the Dakotas and Canada's prairie provinces, less common on the Atlantic Flyway. They are often seen with pintails and wigeons, but they rarely congregate in large flocks. The gadwall dives more often than any other puddle duck. Among the most beautifully marked of our ducks, a pintail male in breeding plumage has a brown head, white neck and breast, and a gray back and sides.
Females are grayish brown.
The speculum is metallic greenish-brown with a white rear border, but far more noticeable in flight is the male's long, slender, pointed tail. Pintails are extremely graceful and fast fliers, fond of zigzagging from great heights before leveling off to land. In summer and fall, pintails feed largely on seeds and vegetative parts of pondweeds and widgeon grass, and on the seeds of bulrushes and smartweeds. Nesting females eat more aquatic insects. Sometimes pintails land in harvested fields to glean waste corn.