Bird of the Week: Freckled Duck
SURPRISE. It’s duck month.
We try our best here at Bird of the Week not to anthropomorphize our subjects too much. Hmm, okay, that might not be true. What’s perhaps truer is that we try not to anthropomorphize based on nothing. Any good or evil, socialist, or cop-hating personality traits we bestow are done so with careful consideration of a bird’s actual tendencies. It’s a tragedy we’ll never know what they’re thinking, but we can try.
What we can know is what’s happening in human brains (sort of), and while I don’t know much, I do know this: ducks are for adults. Let me back up a second. Birds, in general, are a fascination that seems to only infiltrate the minds of those below five years old and over 30—but ducks are a particular subset of that group. For the first part of your adult life, you go about your days thinking of ducks as commonplace, alongside crows, pigeons, robins, and the like. Then one day you wake up, and QUACK, ducks are the most enchanting, fascinating, gloriously goofy creatures on the entire planet. Ducks, quite suddenly, ascend to god-tier, and you are left wondering what was happening in your deficient brain for all these years.
This is true for me. I’m ashamed to say that my gateway drug to ducks was none other than the Central Park “Hot Duck”—a Mandarin duck that took Manhattan by storm in 2018 and 2019. I was so besotted with this mysterious, handsome little guy that I sought him out myself. I still count it among the thrills of my life to have stood on the shores of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir in full rain, chasing after a duck with a bunch of other psychotic New Yorkers. Look at him!
Despite this ardor and fandom, somehow, Bird of the Week has seen an alarming dearth of duck posts. It’s been so bad that in the comments of our 2022 Bird of the Year post, a reader explicitly asked for “duck representation in 2023”! Soon after, Jack delivered a mea culpa in the form of a killer post on the sensational hooded merganser, but dammit if we didn't drop the ball AGAIN. We failed to deliver another duck during the entirety of 2023. I can’t explain it, but guess what? The insanity stops today.
🚨🦆IT’S DUCK MONTH AT DISCOURSE BLOG 🦆🚨
Jack and I were absolutely breathless this week as he discovered duck after duck worthy of inclusion in our celebration. The ducks of this world are heckin good, and we can’t wait to give them their due.
For this week, I simply went with the bird that drew the loudest gasp when I saw it: the freckled duck.
Why continue to do anything when this creature is bobbing around the planet???
The freckled duck is also known as the monkey duck or oatmeal duck among other things, which is funny because those names make zero sense when “freckled duck” is sitting right there. Alas. Freckled ducks are native to Australia, have an elegant upturned bill, and populate freshwater marshes and creeks, preferably with dense foliage for cover.
One of the coolest things about the freckled duck is that the male’s bill becomes various shades of brilliant red at the base during mating season. Now, a lot of male birds sport fancy colors and elaborate displays as part of the mating ritual, but an actual transformation focused directly on the beak is very powerful. The males with the deepest shades of red are the ones who are most dominant, and most likely to breed. Now I don’t want to put our cover boy on the spot here, but if that’s all to be believed, the duck above is horny as hell and likely has many generations of ducklings spawned under his belt. Well done, dude!
It must be noted that the female freckled duck is also stunning. The elegance!
Freckled ducks are rare and classified as endangered, but there’s some good news: in the last few decades, conservation and breeding efforts have been established to help bolster populations in concert with educational and law enforcement efforts to halt the hunting of these perfect, salt and pepper fluffies.
These birds are what I’d call supermodel ducks in that they excel both in still photos and in motion—on the runway of life, if you will. Like come on, I would like a 24 hour livecam of this scene, please:
They glide, they dive and stick their little butts in the air, they putter around in a mellow-yet-determined fashion. The ducks are ducking so hard and doing it so well.
To be honest, there’s not much else to say about the freckled duck, but why waste words anyway when we can just bask in its glory?
But if that’s not enough, the San Diego Wildlife Alliance Library has this fact sheet which contains the kinds of descriptions I would imagine a duck would write! Gems like “Waddle-like walk, similar to most ducks. Fly with neck low—distinctive ‘hunched appearance.’ Run on water’s surface during takeoff,” and “Distinctive coppery sheen in flight. Underparts paler.” That’s duck prose if I’ve ever heard it.
For now I’ll leave you with this: Make way for (freckled) ducklings!
A reminder: you can check out our complete Bird of the Week list here, and get in touch with your bird suggestions at hello@discourseblog.com.
I strongly recommend spending time looking up duck reproduction. Truly fascinating stuff.
Yes, we are into that fantastic stretch of the birding year: WEIRD DUCK TIME!
All credit to the wonderfully talented Rosemary Mosco for coining that phrase: https://rosemarymosco.com/comics/bird-and-moon/four-seasons-of-bird-watching
But yes, it's always a joy in the winter to bundle up and head out to a local pond or the ocean and spend some time admiring the scoters, mergansers, canvasbacks, redheads, and other ducks spending some time in or around NYC. And yes, I will alway start giggling uncontrollably when I hear a gadwall say "hey."