Recent decades have seen a redistribution of wintering waterfowl across the Mississippi and Central Flyways. While climate change is frequently cited as a dominant driver of these shifts, some evidence potentially suggests that land use and habitat change are the primary forces reshaping where mallards winter, with climate acting more as an amplifier than a root cause. This distinction matters, because it reframes both how we interpret survey and harvest data and how future conservation and management strategies should be prioritized.