by Lian Kan
My dad spent the majority of my childhood digging a pond in our small and quaint garden. It is, for what it's worth, a very nice pond, but for around half of my life, it has only had one purpose: to hold fish. That was, until last May. We occasionally see herons in our garden - where my mum’s primary response is to open the window and shout until they leave - and sometimes in the summer we find newts.
But one day, we saw a duck in the garden. The slightly blurry image is a picture I took myself.
It was a momentous day for our family, and we gathered around the window to coo at this duck - which we later identified as a male mallard. We initially thought that it was a one off occasion, but the next day he returned, and with his mate. This time, they delved into the pond and I managed to take a few pictures of them whilst I fed them bread. However, I was quickly informed by my friends that bread was actually harmful to ducks, and that the best thing to feed them was corn, oats or peas. Desperate in trying to make them stay in my garden, I researched into ducks, and discovered that ducks are, in my mind, worse than koalas.
You see, the two ducks in my garden were a male and a female, and I believed that they were scouting out a habitat for their unborn ducklings, so I decided to look up duck breeding habits to prepare for the arrival of my grand-ducklings.
Underneath the blogs about what type of bedding ducks prefer, there were also articles on the ‘sexual arms race’. This is the description scientists have given to the breeding habits of the ducks. Let us begin with the male duck genitalia, which is shaped like a corkscrew and can vary between 1.5 to 40cm long, and if that isn't scary enough, it is also armed with spikes. It works vaguely like a grappling hook, to ensure that the female duck cannot escape. However, evolution is also a factor. Female ducks have evolved to develop anticlockwise vaginas, to deal with the strange penis shape of their male counterparts. But they also have ‘false openings’, making their vagina somewhat like a maze. This is also a product of evolution, as male ducks have the tendency to rape females, and they also frequently take part in gang-rape. This way the female can ‘open up’ the right path for males that she likes, and thanks to this, only 3% of forced copulations end up in pregnancy, thanks to these defence mechanisms. And if this process seems unusual, it is made even more confusing by the fact that 97% of birds do not even have penises.
Unfortunately, a few days after the blessed day of seeing two ducks in my garden, they disappeared and I never saw them again, which is quite disappointing as I traumatised myself with this information only to not have ducklings grow up in my garden.
https://listverse.com/2018/06/05/10-horrifying-facts-about-ducks/
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