So far, aside from identifying my current favourite duck, I’m not having a huge amount of success in my quest to master duckery. Of course, for someone as ignorant as I am about birds in general, any information learned is a step forward. Having said that, I’ve not even been able to find the technical term for such a specialist.
To my great disappointment, there doesn’t seem to be an authoritative book specifically about ducks. I confess, due to other constraints such as my job, I’ve only been searching for a few days and have only scratched the surface. The marvels of the interweb, however, have yielded me few results. There are plenty of publications out there on water birds, birds native to a particular part of the world and even some on just swans and geese, all with sections on my current obsession. There are books on how to keep pet ducks (a future blog post, I think), but nothing on the bird itself. As a starter for about three, good old Wikipedia has an interesting article, but it’s pretty basic and fraught with the usual editorial pitfalls of that website.
All these sources I am sure hold lots of useful information, but I had hoped to find one particular book which serves as the industry standard should an ornithologist or naturalist want something just about ducks; an encyclopaedia, listing all the species currently known, their whereabouts and habits.
If anyone has any suggestions, please fire them my way:
duck.expert@gmx.com
Becoming a Duck Expert 