Some ducks run fast! Indian Runner ducks are originally from Southeast Asia, where they were herded from the house to the rice paddy each day. They had to run fast to keep up with their human herders. With tall, slender, upright bodies, they look like a cross between a mallard and a penguin. Indian Runner ducks are known for their ability to hunt down bugs, slugs and snails and were traditionally employed to perform pest control in the rice paddies. Today they are often used for backyard garden pest control.
A duck’s quack echoes — but you might not hear it. Trevor Cox, an acoustic engineering professor at the University of Salford in Manchester, investigated the myth that a duck’s quack doesn’t echo when he heard from journalists asking him if it was true. He conducted experiments with a duck named Daisy, which quacked in an anechoic chamber designed to suppress all sound reflection and in a reverberation chamber designed to produce an echo, and then tested his hypothesis running virtual trials in outdoor and concert hall conditions. Cox said he thinks the no-echo myth stems from the fact that a duck’s quack is relatively quiet and its echo just isn’t heard.
But it’s not non-existent, and somebody figured that out!