miners from Oregon that was later taken on as a point of
pride. The author, Hazel Mills, writes that rather than an
official state nickname, the Oregon Development League
and Oregon Press Association “jointly condemned the use
of ‘Webfoot’ as descriptive of the state” in 1906.
UO students had a publication called “Webfoot” in
1901, a name they later dropped — perhaps due to the anti-
Webfoot backlash — but by 1926 the Emerald was calling
the football and basketball teams the Webfooters. This
lasted until 1932, Mills writes, when the students voted to
use the less grammatical Webfoots. At some point in the
1950s, accounts vary, Webfoots was changed and shortened
to Ducks; The Oregonian’s headline writers are often
blamed. Thanks to a handshake deal with Walt Disney
— the proof is in a photo of him wearing a Donald Duck
Oregon jacket hanging out with Puddles — the UO mascot
became a fat, white Donald-type duck.
In 2002 Nike apparently thought it would be a good
idea to make the UO Duck a little less fat and slow, and
“Mandrake,” a black-clad muscled duck creature who
sported the Nike “O” and whose costume matched the
futuristic football uniforms, was introduced. The tougher
duck mascot didn’t last a year and it’s porky Puddles that’s
gotten more than six million YouTube hits for his “Gangnam
Style” parody. Despite the Oregon team’s roboduck-like
appearance, it seems that pekin-duck Puddles, bred for
meat and eggs, not for speed, will be their man for the time
being. The Disney agreement was made official in 1978
and the Duck was freed of its tie to the Disney trademark
in 2010, only three years after infamously tea-bagging the
Houston Cougars’ mascot.
A RARE BREED
Holderread has been raising heritage ducks since before
anyone was calling them heritage ducks. Heritage breeds
are traditional livestock breeds that have become in danger
of disappearing as large agricultural operations concentrate
on animals that have high output in a controlled
environment. Holderread and his wife, Millie, moved to
Oregon in the 1970s and began to breed ducks that had
become difficult to find as farming moved from “extensive
farming,” where the livestock foraged for much of their
feed, to intensive more factory-farm type situations. “It
was a struggle because there wasn’t much interest in them,
but we made a go of it,” Holderread remembers of his start
in saving dying-out duck breeds.
When choosing a duck, he says, “I tell people to
choose whatever looks attractive to you in the realm of
breeds that are recommended for what your main purpose
is.” He adds, “Color-wise, I can never predict what
people will like — they are like jewels.” Ducks are raised
mainly for their meat and their eggs, though their down
is also prized.
Holderread says people often think ducks have stronger-
tasting eggs, but he says that depends on what the birds eat.
Foragers, ducks will eat plants and seeds, but Holderread
says ducks will also eat slugs and snails, small fish and
minnows and those “impart a distinct flavor.” Fed a similar
diet to chickens, the duck eggs will not taste any different.
But, he says, duck eggs are “nutritionally higher in
everything than chicken eggs.”
Last year there was a flurry of press about people
raising the ancona duck, a heritage breed that was about to
disappear when Holderread and Millie got hold of a
breeding pair 30 years ago and introduced the breed to the
U.S. The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy still
lists anconas as “critical” on its conservation priority list,
but Holderread says their current popularity and increase in
numbers led him to sell his flock to other breeders and
concentrate on other waterfowl with lower numbers.
Holderread says that from saxony ducks to silver appleyard,
“basically everything we have at this point we still consider
rare enough for there to be some concern over.”
Anconas are spotted, no two ducks alike, and they were
popularized by Carol Deppe’s book The Resilient Gardener:
Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times.
Deppe, also of the Corvallis area, raises anconas she got
from the Holderreads and extols their virtues in her book.
Deppe, a biologist, likes anconas in part because she has
observed these ducks to be “socially matriarchal,” and
14
December 27, 2012 • eugeneweekly.com
A DUCK’S CORKSCREW PENIS REVEALED
K. MCCRACKEN
Holderread says, “I don’t know if it’s because I am a male
or what, but that is not something I would have thought of.”
Given that ducks in the last couple years have been
making headlines for their penis size and for “forced
copulation” (rape was found to be a bit too loaded a term
when you’re talking about ducks), a breed of ducks where
the female duck is in charge sounds pretty good for
backyard duck farming. Male or female, ducks are all
called ducks, but when you are specifically referring to a
male duck, it’s a drake.
F*CK A DUCK
There are a lot of fun factotums about ducks, OSU
waterfowl prof Dugger says. There are 25 species of duck
that appear regularly in Oregon (the diversity is highest at
migration) where they help disperse seeds in wetlands —
bulrush, millet, sedges and grasses. There aren’t invasive
ducks here that drive out other fowl, but mallards released
elsewhere in large numbers have caused problems. He says
that mallards, released in the tens of thousands, may have
contributed to the decline of the American black duck.
If you want to see wild ducks (or hunt them), Fern
Ridge Wildlife Area is a seasonal home to ducks that fly
thousands of miles on their migrations, ODFW’s Roth
says, and corn and other types of grains are grown for the
waterfowl out at the reservoir. When hunting season closes
and breeding season begins the area becomes more of a
sanctuary. And judging from recent studies on duck mating
habits, a little sanctuary might be sorely needed.
Dugger says most birds don’t have penises, but ducks
do. And not only do they have penises, those penises are
sometimes as long as the duck itself. And corkscrew
shaped.
“Why on God’s Earth would you have a corkscrew-
shaped penis?” Dugger asks. He says out of the scientific
context, the penis-measuring work might seem a little
pervy, but it’s actually pretty cool. He says the theory is
that female ducks evolved corkscrew-shaped vaginas in
order to avoid unwanted advances from males.
“Most people in a park have probably seen forced
copulation,” Dugger says. Or if you see three ducks flying
by erratically and “it looks like they’re drunk” and you
looked at them through binoculars it would be two males
and female: “Her and her mate and this other guy trying to
cause problems.”
“We used to say ducks are monogamous,” Dugger says,
“and by and large that’s right,” but female ducks can lay a
clutch of eggs that were fertilized by more than one male.
Not only that but Dugger says some ducks don’t lay all
their eggs in one basket — they will deposit eggs in other
duck nests to be raised by other mothers. He says this
could be due to the mother not being in good enough
physical condition to hatch her eggs, or because she is in
such good shape she lays too many eggs to hatch by
herself.
A Yale professor named Patricia Brennan and Kevin
McCracken of the University of Alaska have done a lot of
the duck sex research, Dugger says. Brennan used high-
speed video to capture the “explosive eversion” of the
corkscrew muscovy duck penises. The ducks keep their
penises tucked away, “nothing hanging down,” Dugger
says, and then forced eversion means it “essentially
explodes, and takes less than one second to go from zero to
6 inches.”
Brennan got the ducks to explode those penises into
mineral-oil-lubricated glass tubes where she discovered
that “duck vaginal complexity functions to exclude the
penis during forced copulations, and coevolved with the
waterfowl penis via antagonistic sexual conflict.”
Or in other words, female ducks have complex vaginas
— complete with dead ends — in order to keep unwanted
males from having sex with them and making ducklings.
The corkscrew penises also have “keratinized ridges and
spines” on them to help the drakes hold on. Receptive
female ducks contract and release their oviduct walls in the
same way as they would if they were laying an egg, which
Brennan speculates helps the “preferred males to achieve
full penetration.”
Another of Brennan’s studies showed that some breeds
of duck, like the lesser scaup and the ruddy duck, grow
longer penises when in competition with other males. The
penises then waste away at the end of the breeding season
and regrow for the next one.
DUCKS FOR DUCKS
Dugger’s duck studies may not be as sexy, or to be
precise, as sex-oriented, as his duck research counterparts’
penis-measuring work, but one area of his research is on
the endangered Hawaiian duck. He says duck populations
in Oregon are in reasonable shape, but that’s not the case
elsewhere. Dugger might be a Beaver, but he thinks the
Ducks could be doing more for ducks.
He points to the University of Missouri’s Mizzou Tigers
for Tigers program that works to save endangered Bengal
tigers. He says the program, launched in 1999, caught on
with other universities that have tigers as mascots and
created some momentum for tiger awareness. “I’ve always
thought that UO could do that,” he says, calling it a “pretty
cool model.”
Oregon may not be the only college with a duck for a
mascot — Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken,
N.J. has a duck, too — but it’s the most famous, so why not
save endangered animals with that popularity? There are
plenty of species of duck that are in trouble, Dugger says,
and saving endangered ducks is “an opportunity for a more
direct connection to that mascot.” The university could
even create an endowed chair for waterfowl studies.
Among the world’s most endangered ducks are the
Brazilian merganser, a river duck that faces gold mining,
cattle ranching and timber harvesting, and the Madagascar
pochard, which was once thought extinct. Duggers’
Hawaiian duck faces loss of wetland habitat and
interbreeding with feral mallard ducks.
“Universities could be doing more for raising the status
of their mascots around the world,” Dugger says.
Ducks for ducks? It could happen. ■