That Duck Thing...

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

That Duck Thing...

I posted the following on a different thread, but it is... er... kind of out of place there.

Hell, it might be out of place here.

Danger... it cannot be unseen and unheard...

Once it's in your head, it's part of your history.

In this universal male-female dichotomy discussion, with all the back and forths in this thread and elsewhere, I keep having quirk attacks.

So here's a monkeywrench I dredged up from dark recesses of my mind--it's something I read years ago:

Necrophilia among ducks ruffles research feathers
by Donald MacLeod
The Guardian
8 March 2005

From the article:

The strange case of the homosexual necrophiliac duck pushed out the boundaries of knowledge in a rather improbable way when it was recorded by Dutch researcher Kees Moeliker.

. . .

Ducks behave pretty badly, it seems. It is not so much that up to one in 10 of mallard couples are homosexual - no one would raise an eyebrow in the liberal Netherlands - but they regularly indulge in "attempted rape flights" when they pursue other ducks with a view to forcible mating. "Rape is a normal reproductive strategy in mallards," explains Mr Moeliker.

As he recounts in his seminal paper, The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard anas platyrhynchos, he was in his office in the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, when he was alerted by a bang to the fact a bird had crashed into the glass facade of the building. "I went downstairs immediately to see if the window was damaged, and saw a drake mallard (anas platyrhynchos) lying motionless on its belly in the sand, two metres outside the facade. The unfortunate duck apparently had hit the building in full flight at a height of about three metres from the ground. Next to the obviously dead duck, another male mallard (in full adult plumage without any visible traces of moult) was present. He forcibly pecked into the back, the base of the bill and mostly into the back of the head of the dead mallard for about two minutes, then mounted the corpse and started to copulate, with great force, almost continuously pecking the side of the head.

"Rather startled, I watched this scene from close quarters behind the window until 19.10 hours during which time (75 minutes) I made some photographs and the mallard almost continuously copulated his dead congener. He dismounted only twice, stayed near the dead duck and pecked the neck and the side of the head before mounting again. The first break (at 18.29 hours) lasted three minutes and the second break (at 18.45 hours) lasted less than a minute. At 19.12 hours, I disturbed this cruel scene. The necrophilic mallard only reluctantly left his 'mate': when I had approached him to about five metres, he did not fly away but simply walked off a few metres, weakly uttering a series of two-note 'raeb-raeb' calls (the 'conversation-call' of Lorentz 1953). I secured the dead duck and left the museum at 19.25 hours. The mallard was still present at the site, calling 'raeb-raeb' and apparently looking for his victim (who, by then, was in the freezer)."

Mr Moeliker suggests the pair were engaged in a rape flight attempt. "When one died the other one just went for it and didn't get any negative feedback - well, didn't get any feedback," he said.

Moeliker won the Ig Nobel prize for his research paper.

But I read this years ago, so I wondered if it was actually a hoax. Over time. somebody would have uuncovered the truth. I Googled it.

Lo and behold, Moeliker did a TED talk about this very case. It's true!

I wonder where the eternal masculine and feminine fit in here. This seems to be one of the cracks in the Cosmic Plan.

I do know that if I were religious in a Christian manner, I would have to say that both ducks are God's creation and He loves them equally. I don't see how to get away from that.

So what was He thinking?

I'll just leave it right there.

I want to say something clever to end the post, by how in hell do you follow that?

MIchAEL