Mandarin Duck

MandarinDuck_flat

Mandarin ducks are totally emo*. What makes them that way? Love. LOVE. LOVE. Mandarins are almost always seen in pairs, a female and a male together. In Chinese tradition, it is said that if the ducks get separated (for instance, if one dies) the other could die from the grief of losing their partner.  And THAT is super emo. The male Mandarin duck is also super emo because it has that “Flock of Seagulls”/arty/angsty look: “sail” feathers raised vertically above the back, a crest of orange and cream feathers, black and white stripes, and gets more colorful during breeding season.

Mandarins, though  originally found only in Eastern Asia, can now be found in Japan, Great Britain, and a few spots in the US.  They are doing ok because they don’t taste awesome to humans and they look so cool. This seems to be a really great evolutionary trick: if your species wants to survive along side humans, be fun to look at and taste terrible (although, humans will eat just about anything, so maybe I’m wrong here. . .).

 

Least Concern

 

*Origin

1990s: short for emotional hardcore .

 

 

Advertisement

2 thoughts on “Mandarin Duck

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.