If you feed them, they will come - they just won't leave.

Several hundred ducks can be seen each day, either congregating outside the Administration Building or using their bright orange, webbed feet to battle the Red Cedar River current.

With their plump bodies shaking, they ruffle their feathers and tuck their heads deeper into their bodies.

Suddenly, the mass of mallards looks up and sees fresh meat - a class has let out of Wells Hall.

They waddle over to greet the crowds and nip at the pant legs of students for any morsel of food.

As they waddle back to reclaim their resting spots on the sidewalks, they loudly voice their agitation with several indistinct warbles of quacks and squawks.

"They are sitters for the winter; it's like they are a tourist attraction," English junior Jeana Rokos said.

In one sense, the students bring the daily waterfowl solicitation on themselves.

After months of generous handouts of tasty bread, the ducks fail to fly south and are left stranded on the snowbanks along the river wanting more, said Joe Johnson, chief wildlife biologist at MSU's Kellogg Biological Station.

"A duck is a mallard duck to me if it is one that acts normally, and to me, those (ducks) never will," Johnson said.

Normal ducks eat nightcrawlers and acorns, Johnson said, but MSU's ducks have become carbohydrate junkies.

"They are welfare ducks," he said. "They go around chasing anyone with popcorn or bread.

"There is nothing you can do about it, because people have an innate desire to feed wildlife."

Decades of carbohydrate handouts have created a generation of ducks too accustomed to the easy life.

"Any time you feed wildlife, they will take advantage of humans," Johnson said.

And this can cause problems such as near starvation, delayed migration and physical ailments for the feathered friends.

Other problems have included the birds' failure to nest because ducks require long grasses to raise their young and the well-groomed grasses on campus make eggs easy targets for raccoons and opossums.

"They are domestic mallards, some of which are not even capable of long-distance flights and are probably incapable of foraging on their own like a wild duck," Johnson said. "The fat domestic mallard can lead to hybridization, and belongs on the farm."

Truly wild ducks wouldn't even be in the state to take on the worst of Michigan's weather, Johnson said. Most of the birds would have packed up and flown to a southern state, such as Arkansas, and wouldn't return home until the ice retreats in mid-March or early April.

"There is always a few ducks who stay in Michigan to tough it out, but a vast majority of them fly south," Johnson said.

Now that the ducks have decided to stay for the winter, students might as well continue to feed them, he said.

"In cold weather, whole kernel corn is the best because it is high in energy and fat, which makes it ideal winter food for the ducks," Johnson said.

The small dam on the river has worked as an artificial habitat for the animals, but Johnson said that is not normal, because it is essentially a man-made park.

Nothing would be able to reverse the problems associated with domesticating the ducks, Johnson said, unless a campuswide prohibition on duck feeding were to be instated.

But until then, most students said they look forward to seeing the ducks each day.

"It's funny, because they are always just chilling on the sidewalks," pre-med freshman Theresa Straubel said as she stared at two mallards scavenging for food in the courtyard outside of Wells Hall.

"It brightens up your day when you are walking to class and you look down and see a fat little duck just sitting there by your feet."