The Ducking Truth: 5 Facts About Ducks You May Not Know

Stunning, fast, and smart, ducks are impressive birds. Here are five little-known facts about your favorite fowl.

1. Warm Swimmers: Ducks can spend hours in ice-cold water without getting frostbitten feet or exerting too much energy. Minimal foot muscles and small blood vessels carrying warm blood to the extremities help them avoid damage due to frigid conditions. While humans would be shivering in a matter of minutes, ducks are equipped with nerves that are less sensitive to extremes.
2. Full-Time Eaters: To get enough protein and minerals to produce a single egg, a female wood duck needs to eat about 75 grams of invertebrates — or 300 invertebrates an hour for 8 hours. The wood duck’s average clutch size is 12 eggs, so chowing down is essentially a full-time job. Wood ducks are also the only waterfowl known to have two broods a year in North America.
3. Efficient Flyers: Most ducks can fly at speeds ranging from 40 to 60 mph. Migrating mallards can often take advantage of a 50 mph tailwind to cover 800 miles over a period of 8 hours! But this kind of efficiency requires a lot of energy. Mallards would need to rest and feed for 3-7 days to recover from such taxing travel.
4. Mile-Highers: Although most migrating ducks fly at an altitude of 200-4,000 feet, some can reach incredible heights several times higher. Mount Everest climbers found the skeleton of a pintail at 16,400 feet. And the highest North American waterfowl on record was a mallard hit by a jet flying 21,000 feet over Nevada.
5. Good Lookers: Ducks have eyes on either side of their head and can control them independently for excellent depth perception in both water and air. They can also see clearly in a wide range of colors, due to more types of cone cells in their retinas. This unique combination gives them much better vision than humans and an advantage in spotting possible threats.