Dirty Dishes	Dirty Dishes Archive

Dawn has always urged caution against anthropomorphizing animal actions. Ants that keep aphids in underground fungus plantations are more accurately said to live in symbiotic relations with their fellow insects rather than engaging in "slavery" to speak of slave aphids is to attribute a human institutional construct to a far-removed relationship established in an entirely different organic context.

Nonetheless, even Mr. Darwin recognized that emotions have genetic antecedents that pre-date our divergence from not only the other apes of the planet, but all the other mammals. Anyone who has stared soulfully into the eyes of a eager-to-please basset hound, or heard the plaintive mewing of a distressed kitten, cannot doubt that animals have feelings that parallel our own. Thus, the recent item sent independently by two alert readers, wherein the sex lives of ducks are dealt with in human terms, may not be as off the mark as Dawn's initial reaction would have it.

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Reports of "gay" birds are nothing new, of course. But Dutch researcher Kees Moeliker thinks he's observed an incident of homosexual necrophilic duck rape.

The extraordinary case came about after a specimen of anas platyrhynchos (known to laymen as a mallard duck) crashed into the glass facade of Moeliker's office building in Rotterdam. "I went downstairs immediately to see if the window was damaged," Moeliker told the press, "and saw a drake mallard lying motionless on its belly in the sand, two meters outside the facade. The unfortunate duck apparently had hit the building in full flight at a height of about three meters 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 picked 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 picking the side of the head."

"Rather startled, I watched this scene from close quarters behind the window [for 75 minutes]," Moeliker continued. "I made some photographs, and the mallard almost continuously copulated his dead cogener [fellow duck]. He dismounted only twice, stayed near the dead duck and picked the neck and the side of the head before mounting again. The first break lasted three minutes and the second break lasted less than a minute. [After an hour and a quarter], I disturbed this cruel scene. The necrophilic mallard only reluctantly left his 'mate': when I had approached him to about five meters, he did not fly away but simply walked off a few meters, weakly uttering a series of two-note 'raeb-raeb' calls. I secured the dead duck. The mallard was still present at the site, calling 'raeb-raeb' and apparently looking for his victim-- who, by then, was in my freezer."

Mr. Moeliker suggests the pair were engaged in a "rape flight attempt." Forced mid-air copulation has heretofore been recognized as a common duck reproductive strategy, but in this DSD (drakes-who-have-sex-with drakes) case, evidently engaged in for thrills. "When one died, the other one just went for it and didn't get any negative feedback-- well, didn't get any feedback," he told European reporters.

Moeliker was awarded a coveted Ig Nobel Prize for his remarkable research.