Duck

Duck is the common name for a number of species in the Anatidae family of birds. The ducks are divided between several subfamilies listed in full in the Anatidae article. Ducks are mostly aquatic birds, mostly smaller than their relatives the swans and geese, and may be found in both fresh and salt water.

Ducks exploit a variety of food sources such as grasses, grains and aquatic plants, fish, and insects. Some, the diving ducks forage underwater, the others, the dabbling ducks, feed from the surface or on land.

The sound made by some female ducks is called a "quack"; a common (and false) urban legend is that quacks do not produce an echo (false, because the acoustic variances of both a duck's quack and its echo are so similar, they almost swallow one another).

The males (drakes) of northern species often have showy plumage, but this is moulted in summer to give a more female-like appearance, the "eclipse" plumage. In many species, moulting birds are temporarily flightless; they seek out protected habitat with good food supplies during this period. This moult typically precedes migration.

Some duck species, mainly those breeding in the temperate and arctic Northern Hemisphere, are migratory, but others are not. Some, particularly in Australia where rainfall is patchy and erratic, are nomadic, seeking out the temporary lakes and pools that form after localised heavy rain.

In many areas, wild ducks of various species are hunted for food or sport, by shooting, or formerly by decoys. From this came the expression "sitting duck" to mean "an easy target".

Ducks have many economic uses, being farmed for their meat, eggs, feathers and down feathers. Most domestic ducks were bred from the wild Mallard, Anas platyrhynchos, but many breeds have become much larger than their wild ancestor, with a "hull length" (from base of neck to base of tail) of 30 cm (12 inches) or more and routinely able to swallow an adult British Common Frog, Rana temporaria, whole.

Ducks are sometimes confused with several types of unrelated water birds with similar forms, such as loons or divers, grebes, gallinules, and coots.

Etymology

The word duck meaning the bird, came from the verb "to duck" meaning to bend down as if to get under something, because of the way many species in the dabbling duck group feed by upending (compare the Dutch word duiken = "to dive").

This happened because the older Old English word for "duck" came to be pronounced the same as the word for "end": other Germanic languages still have similar words for "duck" and "end": for example, Dutch eend = "duck", eind = "end"; compare Latin anas (stem anat-) = "duck", Sanskrit anta (masc.) = "end", Lithuanian antis = "duck".

Gallery

Fictional ducks

• Kyanchome from the anime series Zatch Bell
• The Ugly Duckling by Hans Christian Andersen (In the end not actually a duckling, but a Cygnet)
• Walt Disney's Donald Duck, Huey, Dewey and Louie Duck, Daisy Duck, Scrooge McDuck, and Darkwing Duck. They are modeled after the Pekin duck.
• Warner Bros.' Daffy Duck and Plucky Duck.
• Alfred J. Kwak, Dutch cartoon character
• Various mascots, including the University of Oregon Ducks, the Long Island Ducks minor league baseball team, the National Hockey League's Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, and the United Hockey League's Quad City Mallards.
• Joey's and Chandler's pet "The Duck" from the popular American sitcom Friends
• Duckman Drake, a humanoid shotgun-wielding duck from the Timesplitters video games
• Psyduck and Golduck from the trading card game and Anime series Pokémon
• The duck in the traditional song "Froggy would a-wooing go"; at the end it swallowed the frog
• The Aflac duck
• The Mighty Ducks movies
• Howard the Duck
• Jonathin Quackup
• Montague, a steam engine from The Railway Series by Rev. W. Awdry is better known as Duck.
• Jemimah Puddleduck from the British children author Beatrix Potter.
• Talking ducks in duck jokes.
• Wade Duck from U.S. Acres