Duck

From Freepedia

For other uses, see Duck (disambiguation).

Ducks

Scientific classification

Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Aves
Order:	Anseriformes
Family:	Anatidae

Subfamilies

Dendrocygninae
Oxyurinae
Anatinae
Merginae

Duck is the common name for a number of species in the Anatidae bird family. The ducks are divided between several different 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, insects, and the like. 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.

The males (drakes) of northern species often have showy plumage, but this is moulted in summer to give a more female-like (hen) 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 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.

1 Etymology
2 Gallery
3 Fictional ducks
4 External links

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".