Repost­ed from the old TfK, in hon­or of the late, great Greg Beck.

Over at Death’s Door, there is a cer­tain degree of con­ster­na­tion about the pos­si­bil­i­ty that mal­lard ducks would be gang rap­ing each other.

There is a bunch of con­fu­sion wrapped around that so let’s start slow.

I also was­n’t aware that duck­’s had duck cocks to gang­bang with. I nev­er eat­en a duck but I’ve eat­en a lot of chick­en, and when you buy the chick­en in the store and pull out that lit­tle pouch of giblets and shit, I’ve nev­er seen a tiny chick­en cock sit­tin off in there.

So, what do duck dicks look like, and why don’t you see gen­i­talia in chick­ens from the store?

Most birds cop­u­late with­out a penis. The male essen­tial­ly just rubs the sperm over female gen­i­talia, and fer­til­iza­tion ensues. Some species (water­fowl like ducks and swans, ostrich­es and their rel­a­tives, and some South Amer­i­can species) have a struc­ture that pen­e­trates the female cloa­ca. It isn’t real­ly homol­o­gous to a penis since it seems just to act as a guide for the sperm. This paper describes a 20 cm (not mm) long duck penis with spines (PDF with images). The spines are not typ­i­cal, and 50mm is appar­ent­ly clos­er to nor­mal for a duck. The 50 mm penis would be a cou­ple inch­es long in a bird that is about 2 feet long. I’ll let you do your own math to a more famil­iar scale.

As for rape, the answer is yes. A cou­ple years back, there was this fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle pub­lished in the Nether­lands, describ­ing homo­sex­u­al necrophil­i­ac rape in mal­lards. One duck had been chas­ing anoth­er in an attempt to rape it, when the chasee flew into a win­dow and died. For over an hour after that, the oth­er duck engaged in near con­stant cop­u­la­tion before a sci­en­tist could recov­er the remains for science.

The arti­cle notes that peo­ple who pay more atten­tion to ducks than I do see groups as large as a dozen ducks chas­ing one female and then seri­al­ly rap­ing her.

It also points out that wild pop­u­la­tions of ducks find 2–19% of mal­lard pairs are same sex. I’ve found no data on whether homo­sex­u­al ducks are more com­mon in red states or blue states, but I’d watch for new laws about aber­rant ducks in time for the next election.