Duck

• 1. Introduction

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  Duck is the common name for numerous species of waterfowl, yet the word itself carries a stranger origin than most people suspect. It traces back not to the bird's appearance, but to a verb: the Old English dūcan, meaning to dive or bend down low as if to get under something. That diving motion, performed by dabbling ducks as they tip headfirst into the water to feed, gave us the name we use today. The Dutch duiken and German tauchen share the same root.

  And yet ducks are not what they seem on the surface. They are not a single, unified family. They do not descend from one common ancestor. The very category of "duck" is, in the language of biology, a form taxon, a grouping based on shared shape rather than shared lineage. Swans and geese, which nobody would call a duck, belong to the very same family. What makes a duck a duck turns out to be a harder question than the pond would suggest.

  This is the story of a bird that has fed humans since prehistoric times, puzzled taxonomists for centuries, and somehow ended up as the animal most likely to make people laugh.

• 2. What Is a Duck?

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  Taxonomists have argued for decades over exactly how many subfamilies ducks belong to, with estimates ranging from two to five. The dispute is not merely academic. Wild ducks hybridise at a significant rate, which makes it genuinely difficult to draw clean lines between species and to reconstruct their evolutionary relationships.

  All ducks belong to the order Anseriformes, which also takes in geese, swans, screamers, and the magpie goose. Within that order, almost all belong to the family Anatidae. The so-called true ducks occupy the subfamily Anatinae and are divided into a set of tribes. The largest tribe, Anatini, holds the dabbling or river ducks. The Aythyini are the diving ducks. The tribe Mergini are the sea ducks, specialists in fish and shellfish that spend most of their lives in saltwater. The stifftails of the tribe Oxyurini are diving ducks distinguished by their small size and rigid, upright tails.

  Beyond the true ducks, a host of other species carry the name without fitting neatly into Anatinae. The whistling ducks, the freckled duck of Australia, the shelducks, the steamer ducks, the torrent duck, and the pink-eared duck all occupy disputed positions, shifted between tribes and subfamilies depending on which taxonomist is doing the classifying and whether that classification rests on anatomy, behaviour, or genetic analysis.

  The Call duck offers a crisp illustration of how far domestic breeding has moved from wild origins. Almost all domestic duck varieties descend from the mallard, Anas platyrhynchos, with the Muscovy duck as the main exception. The Call duck takes its name from its original purpose: hunters bred it as a decoy to lure wild mallards out of the sky and into traps. It is the world's smallest domestic duck breed, weighing less than one kilogram.

• 3. Built for Water

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  The bill of a duck is one of the more versatile tools in the animal kingdom. Most species carry a broad, flat bill lined with serrated pectens, comb-like structures that strain water squirting from the sides of the bill and trap whatever food is suspended in it. The same pecten doubles as a grooming tool for preening feathers and as a grip for slippery food items.

  Fishing species carry a longer, more strongly serrated bill suited to catching and holding large, struggling prey. The mergansers are the clearest example: they are adapted to catch and swallow large fish whole. For ducks that dig through sediment, the bill lacks a cere, the soft structure found at the base of many birds' bills, so that digging does not cause injury. The nostrils instead open through hard horn.

  Diving ducks carry extra body weight compared with dabbling ducks, which helps them submerge but makes taking flight considerably harder. The wings across the family are generally short and pointed, and duck flight demands fast, continuous wingbeats powered by strong muscles. Three species of steamer duck take this trade-off to its extreme: they are almost entirely flightless.

  Many duck species go through a period of temporary flightlessness while moulting, during which they retreat to protected habitats with reliable food supplies. The drakes of northern species use this period to shed their extravagant breeding plumage and take on what is called eclipse plumage, a more female-like appearance that offers better camouflage. The paradise shelduck of New Zealand runs counter to the usual pattern: in that species, the female's plumage is actually brighter than the male's.

  Female ducks have also evolved a corkscrew-shaped vagina, an adaptation that resists forced copulation.

• 4. Feeding and Sound

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  Dabbling ducks take their diet from the surface of the water or from land, reaching as deep as they can by tipping upside-down without fully submerging. Their menu is broad: grasses, aquatic plants, insects, worms, small amphibians, and small molluscs. Diving ducks and sea ducks go deeper, hunting underwater. Sandra C. Mitchell, DVM, DABVP, lists a practical range of safe foods for domestic ducks, including small fish, snails, crabs, insects, chopped lettuce, cracked corn, sliced grapes, frozen peas, cooked oats, and cooked rice. The Guardian published a warning that bread, the classic offering from visitors at a park pond, damages duck health and pollutes the waterways.

  The sounds ducks make are considerably more varied than most people assume. Female mallards produce the classic quack, as do females of several closely related species in the genus Anas, including the American black duck, the Pacific black duck, the spot-billed duck, the northern pintail, and the common teal. Male ducks produce a similar but raspier call, sometimes rendered as "breeeeze". Most duck species, however, do not quack at all. The range of duck vocalisations includes whistles, cooing, yodels, and grunts. The scaup, a diving duck, makes a noise that gave it its name directly.

  A persistent urban legend holds that duck quacks do not echo. The Acoustics Research Centre at the University of Salford debunked this claim in 2003, as part of the British Association's Festival of Science. The television programme MythBusters addressed the same myth in one of its earlier episodes.

• 5. Ducks and Human History

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  Excavations of middens in California have yielded duck bones dating between 7800 and 6400 years before present, including remains of at least one now-extinct flightless species. Holocene inhabitants of the lower Ohio River valley captured ducks in significant numbers, evidently exploiting the seasonal abundance that migrating waterfowl provided. Neolithic hunters as geographically scattered as those in the Caribbean, Scandinavia, Egypt, Switzerland, and China all relied on ducks as a protein source.

  In New Zealand, archaeological evidence records that Maori people hunted the flightless Finsch's duck, possibly driving it to extinction, though rat predation may also have played a role. A parallel fate met the Chatham duck, a species with reduced flying ability that disappeared shortly after Polynesian settlers reached its island.

  Today, roughly three billion ducks are slaughtered each year for meat worldwide. Beyond meat, ducks are farmed for eggs and for feathers, especially down. Wild duck hunting continues across many areas, using shooting or duck decoys. Because a floating duck or one sitting on land reacts too slowly to escape quickly, the phrase "a sitting duck" entered everyday language as a shorthand for an easy target. Ducks hunted in the wild may carry contamination from pollutants including PCBs.

  Ducks also appear in heraldry. The coat of arms of Lubana in Latvia and the coat of arms of Foglo in Aland both feature ducks.

• 6. Ducks in Culture

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  In 2002, psychologist Richard Wiseman and colleagues at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK completed a year-long experiment called LaughLab. Their finding: of all animals, ducks attract the most humour and silliness. Wiseman noted that if a joke involves an animal, making it a duck improves the result. He suggested the word "duck" may have become inherently funny across many languages, possibly because ducks are perceived as silly in appearance or behaviour.

  Fiction has enthusiastically agreed. Donald Duck, created by Walt Disney, and Daffy Duck, created by Warner Bros., are among the most recognisable cartoon characters in the world. Howard the Duck began as a Marvel comic book character in 1973 and was adapted into a film in 1986.

  The 1992 Disney film The Mighty Ducks, starring Emilio Estevez, chose the duck as the mascot for a fictional youth hockey team on the basis that ducks are fierce fighters. The film's influence reached professional sport: the National Hockey League team now known as the Anaheim Ducks was founded as the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, taking its name and mascot directly from the film. The duck also serves as the official nickname for the University of Oregon's sports teams, and the Long Island Ducks carry the name in minor league baseball.