Ducks
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
96 free Ducks trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
40 free duck trivia questions with answers, covering the birds themselves and everything named after them. The natural-history rounds ask about mallards, eiders, wood ducks and the other dabblers and divers: how they float, what they eat, why their feathers shed water and where the great migrations go. Then it widens out to Donald Duck, rubber ducks, Peking duck, the Duck Hunt light gun and the old claim that a quack does not echo. Questions start easy enough for a family car ride and work up to ones that will surprise a birdwatcher. Every answer is checked against a real source, so you can settle the argument afterwards.
30 of 96 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How do a duck's feet stay on ice all day without draining its body heat?
Arteries warm the veins
Arteries warm the veins: the vessels run side by side in the leg, so blood heading out hands its heat to blood coming back. The feet run cold, but little warmth leaves the body.
Q 02What is a common collective noun for a group of ducks, especially when they are on the water?
Raft
Ducks on the water are a raft, a paddling or a bunch; on land the same birds become a badling, a brace or a safe.
Q 03What makes up most of the food a dabbling duck like the mallard strains from the water?
Grasses and aquatic plants
Grasses and aquatic plants are the staple: the bird takes in a billful and squirts the water out through a comb-like edge along the bill, which traps the food.
Q 04Which duck's drake sports a pair of orange 'sail' feathers on its back?
Mandarin Duck
The Mandarin Duck drake's orange 'sails' are enlarged wing feathers that stand upright; birds that escaped from captivity have founded a wild population in Britain.
Q 05A long-running myth, tested in a University of Salford sound lab in 2003, claimed a duck's quack never produces what?
An echo
An echo does follow a quack: acoustics professor Trevor Cox recorded a duck named Daisy in an echo-free room and a reverberation chamber, and concluded the echo is simply too quiet to notice.
Q 06Newly hatched ducklings bond with and follow the first moving thing they see, a rapid kind of learning called what?
Imprinting
Imprinting takes only a few hours after hatching, and the object need not be a duck: in experiments hatchlings have attached themselves to people and even to a box on a model train.
Q 07Ducks share the waterfowl family Anatidae with geese and which other long-necked birds?
Swans
Swans, geese and ducks make up the family Anatidae; 'duck' is not a scientific group of its own, just the everyday name for the family's smaller, shorter-necked members.
Q 08A duck dozing at the exposed end of a row can keep one eye open by resting only what?
Half its brain
Half its brain sleeps while the other half keeps watch through the open eye, which points away from the flock toward approaching danger; ducks in the safer middle do this far less.
Q 09Which sea duck's breast down, plucked by the female to line her nest, fills luxury pillows and quilts?
Common eider
Eiderdown comes from the common eider; the female plucks down from her breast to line the nest, and Icelandic farmers gather it after the ducklings leave.
Q 10Which domesticated waterfowl native to the Americas is commonly known in Spanish as the pato criollo?
Muscovy duck
The Muscovy duck, called pato criollo in Spanish, was bred by Native Americans long before Columbus; barnyard escapees now run wild in Florida's parks and suburbs.
Q 11The English word 'duck' comes from an Old English word meaning what?
Diver
Diver is the sense of Old English duce, presumed to come from a verb meaning to duck or dive; it pushed out the older bird name ened, a cousin of German Ente.
Q 12Which stiff-tailed North American duck's breeding drake has a bright sky-blue bill?
Ruddy duck
The ruddy duck drake's bill turns bright blue for the breeding season; birds loose in Britain spread into Europe and were culled there to stop them interbreeding with Spain's rare white-headed duck.
Q 13What former North American name for the long-tailed duck was dropped in 2000?
Oldsquaw
Oldsquaw went in 2000 after biologists warned it could cost conservation the help of Native communities; the AOU took up 'long-tailed duck', the name long used in Britain.
Q 21In Korea, pairs of carved wooden ducks are traditionally given as gifts at what kind of occasion?
Weddings
Weddings are the occasion: the carved pair stands for peace, fidelity and plentiful offspring, because the real birds were believed to stay with one mate for life.
Q 22In Chuck Jones's Duck Amuck, the unseen animator tormenting Daffy turns out to be which character?
Bugs Bunny
Bugs Bunny is at the drawing board when the camera pulls back, grinning 'Ain't I a stinker?'; Jones later flipped the joke in Rabbit Rampage, where Bugs is the victim and Elmer Fudd holds the pencil.
Q 23The Long Island duck descends from white birds imported in the 1870s from which country?
China
Q 14What is Donald Duck's rarely used middle name?
Fauntleroy
Donald's full name is Donald Fauntleroy Duck; the middle name first appeared on his draft notice in the 1942 short Donald Gets Drafted.
Q 15Which wartime Donald Duck propaganda short won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film?
Der Fuehrer's Face
Der Fuehrer's Face puts Donald on a Nazi munitions line until he wakes in star-spangled pyjamas, sees it was a nightmare and hugs a model Statue of Liberty; it won the Oscar in 1943.
Q 16Who first voiced Donald Duck's barely intelligible quacking in 1934?
Clarence Nash
Clarence Nash, by one account, won the part with the billy-goat voice he had done since boyhood; he played Donald for more than 50 years and trained Tony Anselmo to follow him.
Q 17In which ocean did 28,800 Friendly Floatees bath toys wash overboard in 1992, aiding a study of currents?
Pacific
The container spilled in the North Pacific in January 1992, en route from Hong Kong to Tacoma; oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer tracked the 28,800 toys as they came ashore.
Q 18Jacques de Vaucanson's 18th-century mechanical duck amazed Paris by appearing to do what?
Digest its food
Digest its food: the automaton swallowed grain and seemed to excrete it, but a magician who examined it in 1844 found the droppings were pre-loaded pellets of dyed breadcrumb.
Q 19Which Sesame Street Muppet serenades his bath toy with 'Rubber Duckie'?
Ernie
Ernie sings 'Rubber Duckie' in the bath on Sesame Street; released as a single in 1970, Jim Henson's performance became a surprise pop hit, reaching number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Q 20Wood duck ducklings leave their tree-cavity nest the day after hatching by jumping from as high as what?
50 ft
50 ft is no obstacle: the day-old ducklings climb to the nest hole with sharp claws, jump and land unhurt, while their mother calls from below without helping.
China sent the white Pekin ducks that reached America in 1873; farms on Long Island went on to raise so many of their descendants that the island's name stuck to the bird.
Q 24For caneton à la rouennaise, how is the roast duck's carcass treated?
Squeezed in a press
Squeezed in a press, the carcass gives up the blood and juices that make the sauce; Paris's Tour d'Argent hands each diner a card with the duck's serial number.
Q 25The Aylesbury duck, a classic English table breed, is named after the county town of which county?
Buckinghamshire
Buckinghamshire's county town gave the white Aylesbury duck its name; the trade faded after hardier, cheaper Pekin ducks arrived in the 1870s and breeders switched or cross-bred.
Q 26Bianyifang, the Beijing roast-duck house that traces its history to 1416, began under which Chinese dynasty?
Ming
Ming is the dynasty: roast duck was a speciality of Nanjing, the first Ming capital, and is said to have come north when the Yongle Emperor moved his court to Beijing.
Q 27Which future US Secretary of State was served Peking duck on his secret 1971 China visit?
Henry Kissinger
Henry Kissinger, then Nixon's national security adviser, was served Peking duck by Zhou Enlai after a morning of stalled talks in July 1971; the secret trip cleared the way for Nixon's own visit in 1972.
Q 28Nintendo's 1984 game Duck Hunt was played with which light-gun accessory?
NES Zapper
The NES Zapper fires nothing: pulling the trigger blacks out the screen for a frame, then a sensor in the barrel looks for a white flash where the duck was, which is why it fails on flat screens.
Q 29Millions of NES owners got Duck Hunt on a bundled cartridge it shared with which other game?
Super Mario Bros.
Super Mario Bros. shared the cartridge packed in with the NES Action Set, which helped Duck Hunt pass 28 million copies; the game began as a 1976 Nintendo light-gun toy.
Q 30What is the drab, female-like summer plumage that male northern ducks moult into called?
Eclipse
Eclipse plumage comes with the summer moult, when many ducks drop their flight feathers at once and cannot fly, so they retreat to sheltered, food-rich water until new ones grow.