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Sunday 9 November 2014

Duck

At the 1928 Olympics, oarsman Henry Pearce stopped to let a family of ducks cross his lane and went on to win the gold medal.

The number of ducks in the world is estimated to be 1.1 billion, of which the most are found in China. With an estimated 700 million, China has ten times as many ducks as any other country

The country with the second largest number of ducks is Vietnam,.


Some farmers in Bangladesh have switched to raising ducks instead of chickens, because during catastrophic floods, ducks float.

China produces 68 per cent of the world’s duck meat.

The world record for the largest collection of rubber ducks is held by Charlotte Lee of Seattle, who had 5,631 of them in April 2011.

The town of Tübingen in Germany holds an annual rubber duck race every October.

Lake Myvatn in northern Iceland boasts a world record of 16 different species of nesting ducks.


A duck's quack doesn’t echo, and no one knows why.

Ducks quack in their own regional accents.

Most ducks don’t actually quack. Female mallards are the main ones that do make the classic quacking sound, while other ducks coo and yodel.

Ducks have the ability to put half their brain to sleep, and keep the other half awake.

A duck's webbed feet have no nerves or blood vessels, rendering them incapable of feeling the cold.

A duck feather weighs approximately .016 to .063 grams.

Ducks have very good vision. They have the ability to see more colors than humans.

Ducks are very social animals. Males (drakes) and females sometimes live in pairs or together with their ducklings. They communicate both vocally and with body language.


A duck when diving is hidden beneath the pond’s surface and so 'to duck' is to avoid a blow by a quick dropping movement.

The duck is called a duck because it ducks its head under the water to feed. The animal was named after the verb and not the other way around.

The oldest known duck was a Berkshire mallard which died in 2002 aged 20 years, 3 months, 16 days.

A South African farmer uses ducks instead of pesticides on his farm. Every morning he assembles over 1,000 ducks into a line to go and pluck the pests out of his vineyard.

Every day at 11am  the Memphis Peabody Marching Ducks saunter down a red carpet to the hotel's water fountain, hang out for 6 hours then saunter back up to the rooftop. They've been doing this for over 30 years.


The term “lame duck” dates to 18th-century England, when it was first used to describe bankrupt businessmen who were rendered impotent like a shot game bird. 

Anatidaephobia is the fear that one is being constantly watched by a duck. The word was coined by Gary Larson in a 1988 Far Side comic.

In 2002, psychologist Richard Wiseman at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, finished a year-long LaughLab experiment, concluding that of all animals, ducks attract the most mockery; he said, "If you're going to tell a joke involving an animal, make it a duck."

Source Daily Express

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