In the wild there are more than 150 species of wild ducks. People have always valued these birds as a valuable source of meat, so they followed the habits of these birds since antiquity. Because of the man’s close attention to the life of these wild birds, people nowadays know almost everything about the life of wild ducks and in particular about their nutrition in the wild.
Ducks are excellent swimmers, so they easily get food even at a depth of 2-3 meters. For a deep duck, ducks push off from the water with their hind paws, and then use their webbed feet to row under water, searching for tasty algae and insects.
Scientists investigating the diet of wild ducks found that for a wild duck it takes less food to grow than a domestic duck, the thing is that the ducks eat in nature a variety of food, which is extracted mostly under water. That is, their diet includes more nutritious algae and a mass of water insects and larvae.
On the day, one wild duck can eat up to 3,000 insects and about 1.5 kg of aquatic plants, which it extracts due to its outstanding buoyancy.
Diet makes ducks emigrate for long distances. Most species of ducks return from wintering to the Northern Hemisphere precisely because of the abundance of insects with which they can feed their offspring during the nesting season.
