Ducks In The Brush

The slender backs of these ducks pass through the water and waving stalks of grass with the silence of ghosts, yet their shrill voices announce their every move like a band of bragging pub goers jaunting through town. You only need know that these passerines are proud and unafraid, to know how happy they are. Duck is the common name for a number of species in the Anatidae family of birds. They are mostly aquatic birds, mostly smaller than the swans and geese, and may be found in both fresh water and sea water. Ducks are sometimes confused with several types of unrelated water birds with similar forms, such as loons or divers, grebes, gallinules, and coots. The word duck comes from Old English *dūce "diver", a derivative of the verb *dūcan "to duck, bend down low as if to get under something, or dive", because of the way many species in the dabbling duck group feed by upending; compare with Dutch duiken and German tauchen "to dive". Some people use "duck" specifically for adult females and "drake" for adult males, for the species described here; others use "hen" and "drake", respectively. Ducks have a cosmopolitan distribution occurring across most of the world except for Antarctica. A number of species manage to live on sub-Antarctic islands like South Georgia and the Auckland Islands. Numerous ducks have managed to establish themselves on oceanic islands such as Hawaii, New Zealand and Kerguelen, although many of these species and populations are threatened or have become extinct. This sound uses the following file from Freesound: http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=121803